What To Do With A Million Years
In the 1970s, Girard B. Henderson, director of a major brand of cosmetics, had a house built in a residential area of Las Vegas. This was not your average house though, as it was built entirely underground, to provide shelter from the perils of the Cold War. The 1500-square-metre luxury basement residence included an artificial lawn with a swimming pool and miniature golf course. The British artist Juno Calypso was able to stay amid all the gold, frescoes and columns in this atomic bomb-proof setting to stage her fictional alter-ego, Joyce. Her What To Do With A Million Years series of self-portraits blends sensuality, kitsch, glamour, reality and fiction, while alluding to several survivalist utopias and to our fantasies of immortality. In Vevey, her work is exhibited in an unusual underground space.
