Kalashnikovv Gallery presents solo show by Cameron Platter

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Cameron Platter,  Spaceship, 2023, R 280,000.00 ex. VAT, CONTACT TO BUY

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth – nothing more.” Morpheus, The Matrix

Kalashnikovv Gallery is pleased to present “Fish & Chips”, Cameron Platter’s first Johannesburg solo exhibition, featuring new pencil drawings and ceramics.

Platter’s work across multiple disciplines appropriates and filters, in a highly personal and idiosyncratic way, the enormous amount of information available today. Blurring the distinction between high and low, his approach to art making, typically draws from sources as disparate as art history, ecology, psychedelics, fast food, advertising, therapy, collage, and consumerism.

In this show, he presents drawings of a fish, a spaceship, and a crocodile. These animalistic avatars cross-pollinate each other - the spaceship could be a fish, the fish could be a spaceship, and the crocodile stands in for both the reptilian-lizard brain anxiety and prehistoric evolutionary endurance.

Cameron Platter, Paradice, 2023, R 10,000.00 ex. VAT, CONTACT TO BUY

“A sea urchin can live for 200 years. Polystyrene up to a million years. And how they and we are locked, for better or worse, into this primitive erotic dance of life. And how everything is absolutely meaningful and meaningless at the same time. I’d rather be a sea urchin, but there’s a little polystyrene in us all” Cameron Platter, 2020

Fish have been around for 500 million years, crocodiles 250 million years, humans 200 thousand years. Enough said. As with all his work, despite being Day-Glo pop, they also occupy a darker side that speaks to the dystopian and entropic present, where humans are animalistic avatars of mass hysteria, panic, anxiety, and depression.

According to various online dream interpretation websites, spaceships are markers of “a spiritual journey into the realms of the mysterious and the unknown” and “Spaceships symbolise exploration, discovery, and intergalactic travel in dreams”. “They represent a desire for adventure and the unknown, and the need for personal growth and discovery beyond what is familiar and comfortable. Alternatively, a spaceship in a dream may indicate a desire to escape from reality, a need for a change of scenery or a new direction in life.”

Platter’s pencil drawings are meticulous enlargements of quick, impulsive marker drawings and collages that are then carefully plotted, and reworked-into digitally, before being translated painstakingly into pencil on paper. Read as chaotic contemporary hieroglyphs, these drawings are predictions and maps of humanity’s dark future.

Cameron Platter, Greetings, 2021, R 110,000.00 ex. VAT, CONTACT TO BUY

His ceramics are child-like renders of casino chips. Casinos have featured in his work for over two decades. They’re about altered states and consciousness - manufactured realities, hyper-stimulation and sensory overload, being stuck in an endless 24/7 feedback loop. Underwritten with a healthy dose of fear and loathing, and with a deep-seated optimistic yearning to bet the farm and be able to break free from the undertow and setplay of the random allotment of contemporary bonds of race, class, gender, age, politics, history, geography, and culture. We’re all in. You’re either with or against us. In for all or nothing, knowing we could lose everything at any time. The house always wins. And we’re not getting out alive.

These works are Cameron Platter - seemingly jubilant, child-like, and noisy - but are in fact calculated and informed predictions of our cultural economies, ecologies, and a psycho-state.

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About Cameron Platter

Born in Johannesburg in 1988, Platter’s work in drawing, painting, sculpture, tapestry, ceramics, video, and the internet appropriates and filters, in a highly personal and idiosyncratic way, the enormous amount of information available today. Blurring the distinction between high and low, his postmodern and multi-disciplinary approach to art making, typically draws from sources as disparate as art history, ecology, psychedelics, fast food, advertising, therapy, collage, and consumerism.

He has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at Tang Contemporary, Hong Kong (2023); WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town (2022); Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2021); 1301PE, Los Angeles (2018); and Blank Projects, Cape Town (2017). Recent group exhibitions include The Bangkok Biennale (Chaos Calm), Bangkok, Thailand (2022); Tang Contemporary, Memory, Playfulness, and Stream of Consciousness, Hong Kong (2022); MoMA, New York, Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, (2011); Public Intimacy, SF MoMA, San Francisco (2013); Imaginary Fact, The South African Pavilion at the 55^th Venice Biennale (2013); and and Le Biennale de Dakar, Dakar, Senegal (2010).

His work is part of the permanent collections of MoMA, New York, The Zeitz MOCAA Collection, The Bass Museum of Art, The Margulies Collection, and the Iziko South African National Gallery. He was artist in residence for 2015 at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.

He has been featured in publications such as Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Vice Magazine, NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, L’Officiel, Art Africa. He was included in Thames & Hudson “100 Sculptors of Tomorrow” (2019).

Platter lives and works in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and this is  his first solo exhibition with Kalashnikovv Gallery.

Cameron Platter, Secret Island Exodus, 2022, R 12,500.00 ex. VAT, CONTACT TO BUY, as part of Latitudes Limited