Michael Cook’s Invasion

• Rex Butler

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.

They are three large inkjet photographs from Bidjara man Michael Cook’s Invasion series of 2018, titled respectively Invasion, UFO Possums, Invasion, Kangaroo, and Invasion, Giant Birds.