WHATIFTHEWORLD presents I SAW THIS, a new exhibition of drawing, sculpture, textiles and ceramics by Cameron Platter.

Cameron Platter’s interdisciplinary work examines consumption, excess, detritus, discord and conflict within a fragmented South African identity. Through engagement with transitory sources, Platter’s work acts as a locus, documenting a dysfunctional contemporary reality.

In this body of work, Platter has looked towards an internal landscape, while cannibalizing personal, political, and social sources to recharge the contemporary experience. These new series, hybrid monuments to transience and impermanence, highlight Platter’s continued subversion of both medium and content.

In his recent totem-like sculptures, Platter has carved giant wooden forms in an aim to fabricate artifacts albeit artificial ones, in a state of constant decay. Platter uses the charged history of the original objects on which the forms are based in an attempt to produce ‘authentic’ ‘sculpture. In another sculptural series, collectively titled ASPIRATIONAL DIMENSIONAL COMBINES Platter uses collage, as a way to collapse mediums and meaning.

MONSTER, which forms part of a series of four large hand woven tapestries, reconfigures the artist’s two-dimensional oeuvre, acting as a bridge between his drawings, paintings and digital works. These tapestries are a result of intense collaboration between the artist and weavers at the Rorke’s Drift Arts & Craft Centre.

The drawings presented in I SAW THIS act as formal and conceptual links between the different works on exhibition, as well as between past and future output.

Platter’s ceramics are based on marginal vessels, discarded fast-food containers, buckets, cooking pots, beer pots and mugs. The works are of dichotomous process, in that although driven by a therapeutic hands-on approach they finally undergo the uncertainty, degradation, and loss of control in the firing process. As with all his output, these works occupy a site between creative progression and regression.

Cameron Platter lives and works in Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include ‘Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa’, SFMOMA, San Francisco; ‘Imaginary Fact’, South African Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale; ‘De Leur Temps’, Musee des Beaux-arts de Nantes; ‘Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now’, Museum of Modern Art, New York; ‘Rencontres Internationales’, The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Le Biennale de Dakar 2010, Dakar, Senegal; ‘Coca- Colonization’, Marte Museum, El Salvador; and ‘Absent Heroes’, Iziko South African National Gallery. His work appears in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York as well as the Zeitz Collection, The New Church collection and the Iziko South African National Gallery and has been highlighted in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Vice Magazine, NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, Artforum, Utflukt, Art South Africa and L’Officiel Art.