#junocalypso

While Sank endeavours to portray older women as feminine, Juno Calypso offers a critique of the construction of femininity with self-portraits of her alter ego named ‘Joyce’. Calypso works with sets and props to create images of the mundane suburban life of her character. As Calypso explains, ‘Joyce appears alone, consumed by artifice. Her glazed appearance acting as a mirror to the exhaustion felt whilst bearing the dead weight of constructed femininity.’[1]

In Popcorn Venus (Fig. 12) ‘Joyce’ is pictured unenthusiastically emerging from a cake. The garish dated decoration and display of food overwhelms the character. The image balances the tragic and comical nature of the situation. Rather than seduction, ‘Joyce’’s expression shows that she is completely bored and detached from the situation - it looks as if her eyes are moments from rolling to the back of her head. The deadpan aesthetic contradicts the party scenario, and the food appears sickly and unappetising against the pastel hues of the room. ‘Joyce’ has sucked out any joy in the room.  Calypso speaks of the idea that women are photographed like food. ‘…as these very glossy, artificial things pumped full of preservatives, we’ll do anything to stop both decaying’.[2] The photographer takes from this concept by presenting a character who is heavily made up and hard to assign an age to, she uses fake tan, false teeth and eyelashes and a blonde wig to become indistinguishable from her actual self. Like food, the woman becomes a passive object completely consumed, in her case, by notions of femininity and seduction.

The comparison of the woman and food is also repeated in Reconstituted Meat Slices  (Fig.13).

The can of meat is processed so that it no longer resembles meat, but instead a non-descript pink solid. One is reminded of Soylent Green, a fictional source of protein made from humans. Without knowing what exactly constitutes this as meat and the way in which it appears to somehow be involved in the female’s demise, the photograph is comically sinister.  Calypso’s fake tanned body resembles the colour of the meat, the character of ‘Joyce’ is somewhat lost here, replaced by a mass of blonde hair also becoming non-descript. Like the meat that is loosely identifiable as food through colour and texture, the codes of femininity such as the blonde hair, tanned skin and pink strap are the signs that it is in fact ‘Joyce’.  Both subject and tinned meat slices relate to each other in the way that they are both artificial and processed by society - they no longer resemble themselves. The tinned luncheon meat was marketed as a nutritious food, similar to the marketing of the ‘perfect’ female body, but ultimately both are artificial. Here, the female has in effect given up and begins to share the form of the inanimate object beside her.

Calypso’s work also edges to the genre of sci-fi as can be seen in Seaweed Wrap (Fig.14).

After putting sea clay on her body in the past, Calypso decided to recreate the alien appearance with green body paint in her lone visit to a honeymoon Hotel. A green hand emerges from a pink love heart shaped bath tub in a bathroom featuring a mirrored wall.  The image is part of a video Calypso created which involves imagery of ‘Joyce’ contemplating her reflection as she stands in the bath. The video opens with the lights of the room resembling extra-terrestrial space shape headlights in the dark, accompanied by eerie music of a woman’s sweet sounding voice.

After inspecting herself in the mirror (Fig.15), ‘Joyce’ is pictured sat in the bath, her movements become repeated and reversed. (Fig.16)

At one minute twenty-nine ‘Joyce’’s now naked body is green as she repeats the same actions in the mirror (Fig.17).

The effect of panelled mirrors is that multiple angles of ‘Joyce’ can be seen. The imagery then changes intermittently between green ‘Joyce’ and regular ‘Joyce’, giving the impression that her alien version is part of her subconscious materialising as she explores her appearance. Green ‘Joyce’ appears to allude more obvious sexuality with her nakedness and movements, while regular ‘Joyce’ looks more feminine and delicate.

The imagery of the green ‘Joyce’, in the words of Calypso, ‘is all about why we feel ugly…We actually see a monster…We spend hours in the bathroom trying to shed, shave and wash off this horror to reveal our true ‘beautiful selves’.[3]

Calypso may be posing as a specific character, ‘Joyce’ however, the character represents less of a subjectivity and is more applicable to a wider context. Even ‘Joyce’ is somewhat of a shape-shifter. Who ‘Joyce’ is, from the perspective of subjectivity is difficult to define. She becomes a series of codes - a body teetering between human, alien and doll. She is a construction of a construction, created to undermine the notions of femininity and identity or the lack thereof. She is the masquerade of womanliness. As with the tinned meat slices, a commentary can be made on the fact that society has lost the distinction between what is and is not natural. In reality the luncheon meat is not natural and neither is the body which does not decay. False eyelashes, and fake tan are not natural but through repetitive imagery in media it has somehow overtaken its status as artifice and become part of what a woman is naturally expected to look like. Calypso’s photography exaggerates the lack of reality.  

A Modern Hallucination shows a sexually frustrated red head signalling her anguish with clenched fists. She lays tense and wooden on one of two single beds in the bedroom. Her body is laid out following the same shape as the blanket on the bed and similar to the decorative floral pillow, she becomes part of the decoration. She is completely impassive, paralysed, but her inner frustration can be detected. In an interview, Calypso speaks of being influenced by Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth and the idea of the Iron Maiden. The title A Modern Hallucination is quoted from Wolf.

In the Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf alludes to the Iron Maiden to establish a metaphor of the entrapment of women and the image of ‘beauty’.  The Iron Maiden was a torture device fitted with spikes, the exterior taking the form of ‘a body shaped casket painted with limbs and features of a lovely, smiling young woman’.[4] Once inside the victim was unable to move and met their demise. Being trapped is a ‘modern hallucination’ for Wolf, who establishes that directing attention to ‘imagery of the Iron Maiden’ is a cultural tactic of censorship over ‘real women’s faces and bodies’.[5]Offering a way for the phallocentric culture to retain control over institutional structures, which otherwise would be threatened. The sense of woman is repressed, reduced to a state of superficiality - to the ‘lovely smiling young woman’, only existing through images of standardised ‘beauty’ and an enforced feminine ideal.[6] The hallucination becomes real. Wolf suggests that ‘beauty’ is a political currency used against women to restrict, manipulate and to undermine. The character of ‘Joyce’ relates to the image of the iron maiden, a trapped woman ‘paralysed by her obsession with self-improvement and the artificial construct of femininity’.

[1] Juno Calypso, About < http://junocalypso.com/about/> [accessed 14 August 2015].

[2] Nell Frizzell, Portraits of a Surburban Hell <http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/artist-juno-calypsos-turns-prawns-fake-tan-and-sauna-masks-into-portraits-of-suburban-hell-710> [accessed 14 August 2015].

[3] Nell Frizzell, “I sounded like I was having the best sex”: Juno Calypso’s one-woman world tour of honeymoon hotels < http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jul/02/juno-calypso-tour-honeymoon-hotels> [accessed 15 August 2015].

[4] Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (London: Vintage, 1990), p.17.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Wolf, p.17.