June Calypso, the artist who spent surreal days in a deluxe Cold War-era bunker

Juno Calypso, the photographer known for off-beat self-portraits featuring her alter ego, is on the HENI News radar.

The photographer has seen a remarkable 154% increase in her HENI Score—a unique artist’s sentiment—boosted by shows of her portraits taken in a luxurious nuclear bunker built by an eccentric businessman beneath Las Vegas

Calypso’s edgy, surreal images blend performance and self-portraiture, typical feature her posing in an array of props or unusual settings.

Her auction sales have totaled $1,754 in the past two years. She has shown at galleries including TJ Boulting, and now also works with trendy Guts Gallery, both London-based. Works are also available via [FEUTEU] and Kuntz Gallery. Prints of the artist’s works range in price from $400 to around $6,000.

Calypso’s work was included in “The Horror Show,” at London’s Somerset House in 2022 and in Guts Gallery’s recent group show “(It’s My Party) I Can Cry If I Want To”.

The artist’s staged images have recently been featured on clothing. She was chosen to create a limited-edition series of football shirts as collectible art, in collaboration with sportswear supplier Umbro and Oof, the art-and-soccer magazine and gallery based in London.

In 2018, Calypso spent three weeks exploring a 1960s subterranean bunker in Las Vegas created during the Cold War by Jerry Henderson, an American businessman obsessed with living underground. The artist's time in the luxury home resulted in a series of surreal images. In 2021 they were included in “Role Play”, a group show at the Fondazione Prada’s Milan space, which traveled to Tokyo.

She told Dazed magazine about the strange days spent underground in the luxurious but dated interiors as her alter ego, a travel writer called “Joyce”. Calypso said: “The house reminded me of a tomb or a mausoleum. It’s so quiet down there and nothing has faded because there isn’t any natural sunlight. It’s a time capsule. I was imagining what the wife would be doing in this immaculate house, free from the dangers of the world upstairs but also cut off and isolated from it.”

To get a deeper understanding of Juno Calypso’s career visit HENI Dashboard; a unique graphical data tool illustrating an artist’s auction sales, shows, profiles, mentions and their HENI Score. You can search for any one of the 100,000 Artist Dashboards to quickly appreciate their trajectory as well as sharing via email, text and WhatsApp.