AnOther considers Jonny Briggs, a multi-disciplinarian with a penchant for the uncanny, who will stop at nothing in his dissection of the social self
Who? Born in Berkshire in 1985, Jonny Briggs is a multidisciplinary artist best known for his idiosyncratic brand of highly autobiographical, self-psychoanalytical and yet irreverent photography. Graduating from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Fine Art Photography in 2011, Briggs has subsequently been the subject of exhibitions at The Photographers' Gallery, Jerwood Space, Camden Arts Centre, Hauser and Wirth Somerset, Saatchi Gallery and the Zabludowicz Collection. Briggs is a visionary, whose arresting, hybridised creations are not only far more nuanced but also more real than one might at first assume, given their origin in the performative, the cartoonesque and in meticulously staged installation.
What? Briggs is one of 30 artists whose work has been shortlisted for exhibition and entry into UK/RAINE, an open competition for emerging artists from the UK and the Ukraine between the ages of 18 and 35. Aiming to support the most promising young artists who live and work in the UK or Ukraine or were born in either country, UK/RAINE marks a continuation of the collaboration between Saatchi Gallery and the Firtash Foundation as part of Days of Ukraine in the UK, an annual festival celebrating Ukrainian culture in London, and follows on from the huge success of Premonition: Ukrainian Art Now, which ran at the Saatchi Gallery from October 9 to November 3 in 2014.
Briggs exhibits three Lambda C-type photographic prints, Super Natural, Trompe l’Oeil and Organs. Both Super Natural, which features his mother’s pink painted legs splayed against an artificial grass mat bordered by her garden lawn, and Trompe l’Oeil which succeeds in subverting the tradition of the still life, pose interesting questions about the artist’s exploration, interrogation and seeming fabrication of reality. Truculent and teasing, such images operate in the interstices between fiction and reality, commenting not only on the proliferation of photoshopped images in contemporary society, but also on the outmoded intransigence of binary oppositions.
Briggs’ idiosyncratic way of seeing is further articulated in Organs. A vision of terrible beauty, Organs disrupts conventional conceptions of beauty by presenting an upturned vase of flowers which obscures a portrait of his grandfather. Instead of the flowers, it is the muddy roots that are on display. Playing on the word ‘dirty’ as a double entendre, Briggs ponders why it is that the roots "are so commonly considered dirty, when it is the flowers that function as the plant’s sexual organs".
Why? Intelligent, intuitive and ingeniously deceptive, much of Jonny’s work over the past 11 years has featured his parents in a variety of imaginative scenarios, their presence having much to do with the artist’s sustained interest in the credulous condition of childhood. Endeavouring, through a series of reincarnations and reconfigurations, "to think outside the reality I was born and socialised into," he attempts to animate an "unconditioned self".
The dialectical relationship between self and other is clearly something which fascinates Briggs, whose work turns compulsively on the paradox that self and other, whilst seemingly insuperably separated, are at the same time mere recto and verso of one another. His work seems characterised by radical uncertainty and insecurity, uncertainty in particular concerning the distinctions between past and present, self and other, fiction and reality. His characters and protagonists, then, neither projections of the self nor representations of family members, inhabit the ‘eternal interim’ between life and death.
There is a palpable and strangely exhilarating sense in which each of Briggs' works seem imbued with a kind of cryptic potential, the accumulation of which, as well as an emphasis on the fantastical, combine to make viewing an intriguing and rather magical experience.
UK/RAINE: An Open Competition for Emerging Artists from the UK and Ukraine runs until January 3, 2016 at the Saatchi Gallery.
Briggs' solo show, To Eat with the Eyes, runs at Cabin Gallery, London until December 31, 2015.
