Description
This limited offer consists of Cameron Platter’s Sex Slaves and Dineo Seshee Bopape’s Chat-Scat‘. Both of these prints stand out for their bold use of colour and text, but more broadly each print engages with ideas of memory and forgetting in extremely idiosyncratic ways that exemplify each artists’ respective body of work.
Dineo Seshee Bopape’s ‘Chat-Scat’ features SMPTE TV Color Bars, a once ubiquitous placeholder for television broadcast downtime, increasingly confined to the redundant past. The textual reference to a “funny story about my dad and the TV” encourages the viewer to recall and project a personal narrative onto the work. At the same time, it is characteristic of Bopape’s ongoing interest in using video technology to locate herself in space and time.
Cameron Platter’s ‘Sex Slaves’ furthers his continuing engagement with the work of printmaker John Muafangejo, especially the ways in which Muafangejo’s work is recognised over time. Platter turns a darkly satirical eye towards the perverse commodification of struggle art into investment ponzi scheme, drawing an equivalence to leaflets from seedy loan sharks, pawn brokers, and cure-all doctors which are frequently handed out in South Africa’s CBDs.
Cameron Platter, Sex Slaves
Silkscreen on archival cotton rag paper
66.5 x 50.5 cm
Edition of 25
Cameron Platter (b. 1978) is based in the KwaZulu-Natal and Cape Town, South Africa.
Known for his ultra-primitive, anti-aesthetic view of contemporary South African morality, Cameron’s process of digital collage found a logical translation into silkscreen with a very richly inked, high-gloss finish in the final print. The ‘undisputed king of Afro-bling’ and ‘an agent provocateur with a sinister agenda’’ draws our attention back to his enduring interests in media, pornography and politics in this work that is interlaced with themes of sex, irony and cynicism.
Cameron’s print is a multi-coloured silkscreen printed with solvent-based inks, produced in Johannesburg and editioned with Genevieve Wood.
Dineo Seshee Bopape, Chat-Scat
Silkscreen print on archival cotton rag paper
66 x 50.5 cm
Edition of 25
This remarkable many-coloured screenprint has been commissioned especially for ArtThrob. It was printed at Caversham Press by Malcolm Christian, assisted by Alex Shabalala, in KwaZulu-Natal where Bopape worked in residence. Bopape’s work is characterised by an evocative and deeply personal interest in locating herself in space and time. This manifests as a dance between surface and screen, personal history, and the banality of ordinary objects and moments. In Chat-Scat, the television test pattern and quote from an online chat forum explore a particular immaterial aspect of the virtual techno-scape, whilst simultaneously claiming that space for the artist’s personal history.
