MICHAEL COOK : BROKEN DREAMS

Michael Cook was born to an Aboriginal father and grew up adopted into a Western family. The artist’s work focuses on subjects such as postcolonial identity, dispossession and displacement, often inverting perspectives between colonizer and colonized, and blending history with the imaginary.

The Broken Dreams series, comprising ten large-format photographs, was produced in 2010, the first year of his artistic career. In these successive tableaux, a young Aboriginal woman imagines herself in the strange clothes of European settlers and their material possessions. Her reflections are curious rather than fearful: do they feel the same as she does? As her journey progresses, she realizes that their culture is not her own. In time, she sees the impact the new settlers are having on her people. Her dreams shattered, in despair, she sheds her new clothes and returns to her roots to find freedom – the connection to her land.