Juno Calypso
Juno Calypso is a British artist working with photography, film and installation. Her self-portraits are personal works about feminism, isolation, loneliness and being self-sufficient. Working alone, Calypso has made highly stylised photographs of herself whilst dressed as a fictional alter-ego, "Joyce", in unusual surroundings. Studying solitude, desire and femininity through a dark comedy lens, much of her work studies the "oppressive elements of femininity" and its "restrictive beauty regimes and modern rituals of seduction". She has said "I'm trying to make a perfect photograph of a woman trying to create a perfect vision of herself".
In 2015 Calypso took 'Joyce' to a romantic themed couples-only resort in America. Posing as a travel writer, Calypso gained access to multiple rooms which she used to stage her series of solitary self-portraits. 'The Honeymoon’ was awarded an international prize by The British Journal of Photography. For her 2018 project ‘What to do With A Million Years’, Calypso staged photographs in a mansion built underneath Las Vegas in the 70s as a shelter from nuclear terror, and currently owned by a mystery group attempting to achieve immortality. Nell Frizzell wrote in The Guardian that "there is a sense of airless claustrophobia about much of Calypso’s work. But …
Juno Calypso is a British artist working with photography, film and installation. Her self-portraits are personal works about feminism, isolation, loneliness and being self-sufficient. Working alone, Calypso has made highly stylised photographs of herself whilst dressed as a fictional alter-ego, "Joyce", in unusual surroundings. Studying solitude, desire and femininity through a dark comedy lens, much of her work studies the "oppressive elements of femininity" and its "restrictive beauty regimes and modern rituals of seduction". She has said "I'm trying to make a perfect photograph of a woman trying to create a perfect vision of herself".
In 2015 Calypso took 'Joyce' to a romantic themed couples-only resort in America. Posing as a travel writer, Calypso gained access to multiple rooms which she used to stage her series of solitary self-portraits. 'The Honeymoon’ was awarded an international prize by The British Journal of Photography. For her 2018 project ‘What to do With A Million Years’, Calypso staged photographs in a mansion built underneath Las Vegas in the 70s as a shelter from nuclear terror, and currently owned by a mystery group attempting to achieve immortality. Nell Frizzell wrote in The Guardian that "there is a sense of airless claustrophobia about much of Calypso’s work. But in the Honeymoon Hotel pictures, that frustration is twinned with loneliness." Alexandra Genova wrote in Time that her "work is a delicate dance between comedy and despair."
Calypso was joint winner of the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award in 2016, and in 2018 she received the Vic Odden Award from the Royal Photographic Society.
Courtesy of AB Projects