Cameron Platter - Fish & Chips

01.07.23 - 29.07.23
Solo Exhibition at
Kalashnikovv Gallery,
Johannesburg

Exhibition Statement

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

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.

“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.

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 set play 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.