Juno Calypso and Felicity Hammond
British Journal of Photography International Photography Award 2016
25 February - 19 March 2016
TJ Boulting is delighted to present for the second year running an exhibition of the winners of the BJP International
Award. This year the ‘Series’ winner is Juno Calypso, with her beguiling commentary on beauty and femininity told through self-portraiture and her fictional character ‘Joyce’. Joyce was first created in 2011 and consolidated her use of self-portraiture for over twenty years. Last year Calypso took Joyce to a couples-only resort in Pennsylvania, spending
a week alone in the Honeymoon Suite with a suitcase of wigs and wedding lingerie. Over the course of the week she
produced new images and videos, self-portraits as Joyce all alone in this surreally staged fallen utopia of love and happily
ever after. Archaic instruments of beauty became eerie accessories of something a lot more unsettling, turning the mirror
back on our own fascinations with perfection. “I perform solitary studies into rituals of seduction and the laboured
construction of femininity. Objects once perceived as radical, fun and nutritious – an electronic anti-wrinkle mask,
baby oil, a tin of cold meat – have become joyless and oppressive. 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.” In the
main gallery will be a series of prints of the series, whilst in the back gallery there will be a projection of her video “The
Honeymoon Suite”.
The ‘Single Image’ winner is Felicity Hammond, who will present the image from her series ‘Restore To Factory Settings’
as an installation, incorporating sculpture and elements of the gallery space. Her title refers to forgotten industries, and
a dystopian urban dream lying in ruins. The image is a large-scale photographic collage and coloured blue - the colour
of a computer screen when it is unable to transmit information; it is a miscommunication, an error report, a simulation
or substitution. It is also the blueprint, the planning of the future yet also its failure, as piles of detritus, tyres and twisted
metal lie redundant in her constructed landscapes. The images were taken on sites of urban regeneration, including
Stratford in the run-up to the Olympics, and former factories in north London. “Manufacturing and industrial process
has been discarded, and I am interested in the way in which these sites which were once producers of power, have now
become a product of it. The reference to the digital realm, and the ‘error report’ (the blue screen and the factory settings)
comes from my interest in the interplay between the rise of digital technologies and the decline in manufacturing.”
BIO
Juno Calypso is a 2012 graduate of the BA Photography course at LCC, where her 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 won the Visitor Vote Prize. Juno has exhibited
internationally with group shows in London, Miami and New York, and her work has been featured in The Guardian, Dazed & Confused,
The Sunday Times, VICE, and The Huffington Post amongst others.
Felicity Hammond graduated from the MA Photography course at the Royal College of Art in 2014. Since then she was a Finalist at
the Catlin Art prize 2015 and Saatchi New Sensations 2014 and has been in a number of group exhibitions including at the Saatchi
Gallery and the Lowry Museum, Manchester. Her work has been featured in the Catlin Art Guide 2015, Dazed Digital, Wallpaper, Vogue
Italia, Time Out and Hunger magazine amongst others.
