Juno Calypso: Fantastical Self Portraits of An Alter Ego

Juno Calypso is a London-based photographer who works through an alter-persona to probe questions of femininity, sexuality, and consumption within an abstracted place and time. Her aesthetic is riddled with a type of candy-coloured nostalgia that strikes as a cocktail of overwhelming ennui, hyperbolic girlhood and consumer alienation. Meanwhile, Calypso’s invented character Joyce is perhaps something other than human herself.

Born in 1989, Calypso graduated from LCC with a BA degree in Photography. It was there that she began a series of staged self-portraits that addressed, through means equally elaborate as they are deadpan and opaque, a critique of daily rituals of beauty, labours of femininity, and the mass web of anxiety, product placement, hyperbole and “miracle solutions” – in all their pore-be-gone, fat-melting absurdity – that holds these standards up.

Her signature style is an elaborate, fantastical world that is treated so seriously it becomes stupefying in an almost Lynchian fashion that’s mixed with the soft stage edges and creamy pastels of Edward Scissorhands. It’s at once nostalgic and patently critical of something – you can feel that almost physically, in a way that’s sickly sweet. As Joyce flits from scene to scene – from the weirdly-giddy banality of an unlit cigarette-wielding secretary flanked by impossibly fresh lilies, to an alien babe feelin’ herself, to a bathroom floor faceplant featuring corned turkey dogs, the direction of critique slowly unravels.

At stake is a face-on critique of standards of femininity and beauty, as well as the absurdist-grade labour behind the rituals encompassing both. In a gesture that fights fire with fire, Calypso’s hyper-aestheticized, dreamscapes of isolation pack the surreal punch needed to peel back the layers of make-up and other artifices used to conceal the absurdity of this normalisation.

In 2012 Juno’s degree show was awarded both the Hotshoe Portfolio Award and the Michael Wilson Photographic Prize. In 2013 The Catlin Art Guide featured Juno as one of 40 of the most promising new artists in the UK, subsequently shortlisting her for the 2013 Catlin Art Prize, where she was awarded the Visitor Vote Prize.Juno has since exhibited internationally with group shows in London, Switzerland, Mexico and New York. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Dazed & Confused, i-D, VICE, The Sunday Times, and The Huffington Post amongst others.

Most recently, Joyce’s escapades have led Juno to the United States, where she spent a week alone at a couple’s-only resort in Pennsylvania. This new series, Honeymoon, absorbed the attention of  The British Journal of Photography, who selected it as the winner of its 2016 International Photography Award (IPA) Series winner. The Honeymoon series has made several rounds of exhibits in London and New York, from Flowers Gallery to TJ Boulting.