Cover image of the review
Michael Cook, Invasion, UFO Possums, 2018, inkjet print, 135 x 200 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased Victorian Association for Living Australian Artists, 2018.

Michael Cook’s Invasion


14 Oct 2023
National Gallery of Victoria | The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia

There are three of them in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. In one, giant possums on top of spaceships fire down on a group of children running screaming along a pebbly overcast beach. In another, a kangaroo appears to cast laser beams from its eyes, hitting a man in a suit who reels back arms out, while a terrified mother and child in a pram look on in horror. And in the last and undoubtedly strangest, giant featherless yellow-crested cockatoos sit atop pedestals on either side of a tube station entrance squawking at commuters as they come up the stairs, while next to them their chicks are propped up high in a nest on a streetlamp, and what looks like a statue of a rider on a horse turns away in the background.

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