Two UK-born female artists will today go on display at London’s TJ Boulting, as the winners of the BJP International Award. Winning for ‘Series’ and ‘Single Image’ respectively, Juno Calypso will display six photographs and a video of her signature character, Joyce, while Felicity Hammond will show an installed adaptation of her image series Restore To Factory Settings.
Rising, green-tinged and mermaid-like from a baby pink heart shaped bath, Calypso’s Joyce has become instantly recognisable. Her body is reflected pin-up style in one shot, in another, a single green hand slides over the side of the tub—glamorous despite its sickly tinge, and ever-so-slightly ominous. ‘I perform solitary studies into rituals of seduction and the laboured construction of femininity,’ the artist has said, ‘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.’
Hammond’s blue-washed C-type print Restore to Factory Settings has the feel of an etching, with massive amounts of detail and an aesthetic appeal that is at odds with the heap of rubbish sitting in the foreground. When a screen is unable to transmit information, it will show blue, it’s the colour of miscommunication. For the exhibition, the RCA graduate will incorporate installation and sculpture, developing on the collaged nature of the original image, which was formed from multiple photographs of sites of regeneration, namely, a pre-Olympics Stratford and former North London factories.
‘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,’ says the artist. ‘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.’
‘BJP International Award 2016: Juno Calypso, Felicity Hammond’ will be showing at TJ Boulting until 12 March.
