Cameron Platter

Hidden under childlike playfulness is an investigation into the sinister underbelly of our age: of capitalism, conspiracy, colonialism, moral degradation, existentialism, humanness, and suffering. He uses tropes of pantomimes, supernatural landscapes, kitsch aesthetics, and comical encounters between objects and avatars as a way of palatably communicating our most disturbing transgressions as a civilisation.

Almost as if through positive and negative feedback loops, the artist overlaps images of desire and joy with those of fear, panic, and despair. Through his combination of imagery and text, he applies the concept of ‘collage’; flattening the hierarchy of symbols, language, art forms, and eras.

His work explores various aesthetics and design, referencing Modernist designers Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier, Fauvist artist Henri Matisse, and Modernist artists John Muafangejo and Ernest Macoba, and placing their influence in equal footing with technology giants in silicone valley, informal tradesmen in downtown Durban, and gallerists in Paris and Los Angeles.

It is this indiscriminate approach to symbolism that maintains Platter’s practice as instinctively non-normative. He rejects notions of the linear, secular, and rational, and rather centres a form of story-telling that is curiously relatable. His work is an endless connective loop of opening and closing tabs; of contradicting questions and answers. Platter switches from one chaotic thought to the other, with each layer informing the next in his stream of consciousness approach.