Executed in 2012 – the year that Johnny Briggs won the Saatchi Gallery’s New Sensations competition – Un-Seeing is an enigmatic example of his celebrated photographic montages. Inspired by artists such as Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and Rene Magritte, his works seek to resolve the distance between his childhood and adult realities, frequently featuring his own parents in staged, surreal compositions. As Briggs explains, ‘The montage is a way of clashing alternative visual realities and time frames, of juxtaposing different ways of seeing. Through making in this way I’m reminded of growing up in the bubble of the family home. Only as I grew older did I have the opportunity to see outside the version of normal I was socialized into, and realize there were so many other versions of normal out there that cancelled each other out in the realisation that nothing is normal at all. From this I entertain the thought that much of culture is artificial, and gets in the way of seeing what’s actually there. My parents and I have different ways of seeing the world, and like the work it encourages me to see our relationship also as a montage of different time frames and ways of seeing.’
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