NYAB Event - Jonny Briggs “Monstrares”

Jonny Briggs “Monstrares”

Julie Meneret Contemporary Art

This event has ended.

Julie Meneret Contemporary Art presents the work of Jonny Briggs with the exhibition Monstrares.
Jonny Briggs is a British conceptual photographer whose work focuses on the latent yet powerful effects of familial memory. Through elaborate staging, he creates uncanny effects that appear digitally manipulated but are in fact three-dimensional scenes. The resulting images seem to drift in from a different reality, where perception is perverted to reveal something menacing below the surface.

The struggle between individual desire and societal expectation has fascinated Briggs, who grew up in the British woodlands with four older sisters. It is within the tiny public of the family that privacy and visibility take on their most acute implications. The title of the show, monstrares, is the Latin verb “to reveal,” which derived from the Latin monstrum, meaning omen or monster, which gives us our modern English word. The artist asserts that human nature involves contradictory impulses; to be consistently restrained and well-mannered in order to find societal acceptance, yet to freely satisfy one’s primal and bodily desires. Guilt and shame keep the animal at bay, and it is perhaps for this reason that “reveal” has come to mean “monster.” Showing, expressing or making the private public, has become “monstrous,” deviating grotesquely from the norm.

There is something intriguing and surreal about the way the body is fragmented in Briggs’ imagery. In his recent work the human figure is all but absent, yet traces of life haunt the images. Panels of wallpaper in Monstrare and The Cage provide a domestic context in which a figure lurks, trapped in a repeating pattern that renders a subject invisible. The viewer looks into a blank void penetrated by a single pointing finger in Looking, riffing on the way that desire to touch has been covertly motivating visual imagery throughout art history.

His most recent project involved casting his childhood home with latex to create life-sized molds that he then photographed emptied of their original support. Space is physically collapsed and doubly indexed by this practice. Flattening the surfaces of his memories, Briggs’ photographic process, surreal and abreactive, echoes the warped visual process of memory itself. Briggs works are profoundly personal, registering the artist’s psyche at every moment, yet also pointing to family politics as a microcosm of disturbed behavior.

Briggs is the recipient of the Saatchi New Sensations Prize, a finalist for the Catlin Art Prize, and has been the subject of much press in publications such as Aesthetica, The Independent, Dazed & Confused, and The Guardian. Briggs has exhibited work throughout Europe and the UK. This is his first exhibition in the United States.

Saskia Hamilton is a poet and poetry scholar whose writing has appeared in journals such as the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, New York Times Book Review, and Ploughshares. She has authored and edited numerous books, and is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts.

[Image: Jonny Briggs “FILLING THE VOID”, 2013, C-PRINT, 52.5 X 66CM]