A deeply incisive, honest and idiosyncratic artist, the exhibition by Australian photographer Ray Cook consists of a wide-range of his output from his work. Starting with some of his earliest photography from the late 1980s – the anarchic When my ship comes in, I’ll be waiting at the airport – it also includes his visual rumination on the aftermath of AIDS with At first I was Afraid, I was Petrified in 2002, as well as reflection on his changing relationship with the gay-scene (and its appropriation by the mainstream) in Not with a bang but a whimper.
“Subversive” can be a lazy label for artists who tackle taboo subject-matter – especially when those matters relate to their own lives. While it is certainly a by-product of Cook’s methodology, its intention is more nuanced than initial impressions suggest. His tableaus of death and sexuality are delicately balanced with notes of irony, humour and camaraderie. While artifice and theatre are omnipresent – from phallic props to pink-tinted costumery – high camp burlesque is subdued by the palpable humanity of his models, almost all of whom are friends or acquaintances. There is sufficient disconnect between the garish (often hand-made) scenery and the vulnerable demeanour of his subjects for the real and the fantastical to blend; the outcome a potent distillation of the artists own lived experience.
Curated by Ashley Lumb, an independent curator based in Melbourne, Australia, these images attest in their assemblage of modes (modern and ancient, silly and serious). Ray Cook has been able to achieve this in numerous ways. He dissociates the symbolic from the material to reinvest “deviant” sexuality with its inherent humanity, and gently ribs liberalist accounts of the homosexual as victim in his eloquently pragmatic works on the physical and psychic effects of AIDS.
“For all its gothic excess and sideshow knockabout Ray Cook’s oeuvre addresses the fundamental questions we all face in life: finding a place, finding love and facing the inevitability of death, whenever that comes. Although they are grouped under a series of rubrics, each body of work is not a separate entity but merely a division of one continuing story into convenient chapters. And the underlying story, once grasped, is admirably coherent, surprisingly personal and disarmingly frank.” – Cook, R, Ortega, M, Foster, A & Queensland Centre for Photography 2007, Diary of a fortunate man: Ray Cook photographs, Queensland Centre for Photography, Bulimba, Qld.
Daniel Pateman
Full Disclosure: The World of Ray Cook
17th January – 30th January, 2018
Carmel by the Green
287A Cambridge Heath Rd
London E2 0EL
United Kingdom
