Octopus 7: Don't Show Me Your Poetry

Curated by Robert Cook

In 2007, Gertrude Contemporary commissioned Perth-based curator and writer Robert Cook to assemble the annual exhibition Octopus. Titled Don’t Show Me Your Poetry, Octopus 7 began with the idea of “the bedroom as a conceptual space”. Cook’s exhibition posited the bedroom as a site of tetchy becoming, where “the administered public realm and the private zone of retarded dreams and endless rehearsals is forever negotiated.” Bringing together a selection of artists working with what Cook terms “a heightened form of personal style”, in a range of media, including publishing, sculpture, photography and drawing, Don’t Show Me Your Poetry articulated the unbearably awkward fissures between personal desire and public display. Robert Cook is Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia.