'Monster'

Cameron Platter’s interdisciplinary work examines consumption, excess, detritus, identity and violence within a fragmented society. Through engagement with unorthodox and transient sources, his work schizophrenically documents and unearths contemporary reality.

Entitled 'Monster', this exhibition presents an installation of new sculptures, drawings,
ceramics and tapestries that look towards an internal landscape while cannibalizing the
personal, political and social. These hybrid monuments to transience and impermanence and
nightmare highlight Platter’s continued subversion of both medium and content.

In his sculptural series, ‘Aliens’,carved wooden forms recreate totem-like artifacts. Drawn
from disparate sources such as Brancusi and Moore; ethnographic objects (from the future or
the past); futuristic sci-fi weapons; sex toys and fetish objects – they are an attempt to
produce an authentic sculpture in an inauthentic manner. The monolithic sculpture ‘Monster’ is a shape - shifting collage/ assemblage that embodies the collapse of meaning and medium. Standing over 3 m tall, it is parts totem, dysfunctional consumerist object, monument and portal to the 4th dimension, a relic from a dystopian future.

The drawings presented in Monster act as formal and conceptual links between the different
works. The focal point of these drawings is ‘Stations II’ a large - scale pencil crayon triptych
that reflects the artist’s ongoing investigation of the residues of excessive consumption and
decay. In the same vein, the ‘Stain’ series of pencil crayon studies capture fallouts and
defects, reclaiming unresolved fragments (of other drawings) and reanimating them as formal
compositions. ‘River’, a series of charcoal drawings, has its genus in a set of drawings made
in strip clubs. These nocturnal public performances have mutated into a meditative private
engagement with drawing and note - making in the studio.

‘Invasion’, a large tapestry, is part of an ongoing series called ‘Drift’, which reconfigures the
artist’s two - dim ensional oeuvre and acts as a bridge between his drawings, paintings and
digital works. The process - driven works in ‘Drift’ are concerned with therapy, and the collage
of archive, landscape and South African history. They challenge the assumed hierarchy of
the traditions of craft and painting.

07 June - 19 July