Robert Platt

About Stamps

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About Stamps

Robert Platt

Associate Professor, School of Art & Design

Contact

Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Office: 2082 AA
Personal Website

Curriculum Vitae

PhD, Painting, Kyoto City University of Arts, 2010
MA, Painting, The Royal College of Art. 2001
BA (Hons), Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University of Art & Design, 1996

Biography

Robert Platt’s diverse creative practice investigates the complex relations between the vicissitudes of designed nature and the experience of landscape. Recurrent themes include camouflage, perceptual obscuration, and correspondences between the material and incorporeality as we negotiate increasing exposure to hybrid realities.

Through a discipline of painting in the expanded field, Platt’s creative practice regularly employs experimental optics, performative photography and architectural interventions that merge and contrast to expose multiple meanings of territory, spatial awareness, and identity. His intentional analog assemblages are presented as a playful space where the viewer can pay greater attention to deeper spatial, material, poetic and philosophical values embedded in a long tradition of constructed nature.

For Platt, embedding oneself within a setting and deploying techniques of stealth and camouflage customarily associated with the animal world, tropes of hunting, asceticism or ground warfare allows the viewer an alternative perspective and understanding of the figure in landscape.

The interplay between the somatic and immateriality, light, shadow, and screen creates a physical and representational field of play that explores the human impulse to see and show, on one level, and to conceal and hide on the other.

Within the mutable space of landscape, Platt’s work re-orientates the viewer from reflexive observation towards a dialectical approach to the spaces of prospect and refuge where concealed layers of information and meanings extend the scope of perception beyond the object of representation and the Cartesian ‘World Picture.’ Our habitual modes of being in the landscape that relates to atavistic modes of survival, control or possession are progressively eroded through a diminished human presence and substituted for a dissimulated position that promotes new opportunities for us to coexistence in the environment with empathy, intimacy, and environmental awareness.

Robert Platt received his BA in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University and an MA in Painting from The Royal College Of Art, London, UK. In 2009 he gained a Practice-Based Ph.D. in Contemporary Art Practice (Painting) from Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto, Japan. He joined Stamps in 2011 and holds the position of Associate Professor of Art in addition to a faculty member for The University of Michigan Center For Japanese Studies. Platt’s work has been written about in Art in America, and Frieze magazine. He has been actively involved in residencies in India, Japan, Europe and has participated in Arctic exploration. He regularly exhibits his work both nationally and internationally with recent solo exhibitions in Japan, Ireland, South Korea and New York. Group exhibition highlights include A Rose is Rose (The Butcher’s Daughter, NYC), and Displacements (Renmin University, Beijing, China). His works are included in the public collections of Toyota and Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo collection.