JULIE RRAP Australia
ST PAUL ST

The new interactive work titled Body Double created for the 3rd Auckland Triennial, 2007, emerged from a proposed interactive installation for ACMI in Melbourne titled Raft and two bronze and rubber sculptures titled Hard Core / Soft Core which formed part of a suite of work from the show Fall Out at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney in early 2006. In broad terms both these works explored evolving contemporary representations of body sculpture and the role of the viewer in these interactions. Materially, the use of bronze signalled a more static and classical approach, while silicon rubber expressed a more latent and mutable connection.

Body Double intensifies this relationship to materials by using two white life-size rubber body casts onto which are projected moving bodies. The viewer becomes implicated through their own movement, triggering an active choreography that unsettles the static nature of the reclining forms. This journey creates 'turbulence' in our understanding of the stillness of sculpture and pushes the body through a series of transformations that twist, distort and re-assign gender, echoing the hermaphroditic forms of early marble sculptures. The cycle of arrival and departure that the work suggests, as moving flesh slides out of one still form and into another, conjures spirits and phantasms and the endless loop of time.

 - Julie Rrap, November 2006

Background

Born in Lismore, Australia in 1950, Julie Rrap currently lives and works in Sydney. She has an extensive exhibition history dating back to the 1980s. Recent solo exhibitions include Soft Targets, shown at both the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney in 2004 and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, 2005; and Fall Out, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2006. Her work has also been in major Australian and international exhibitions including: Australian Perspecta, Sydney, 1983, 1985 and 1987; the Biennale of Sydney, 1986, 1988 and 1992; Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia, seen in Korea and Japan, 1996; and Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968 - 2002, National Gallery of Victoria , 2002. Other recent group exhibitions include Australian Culture Now, Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the National Gallery of Victoria Australia, Melbourne, 2004; The Dead Travel Slow, Artspace, Sydney, 2004; and Girls, Girls, Girls: Images of Femininity from the Banyule Art Collection, Bendigo Art Gallery, 2005. In 2001, Rrap won the Hermann's Art Award and was awarded a Fellowship Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. In 2007, Rrap's work will shown in a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Publications include Victoria Lynn's forthcoming monograph published by Piper Press and Julie Rrap, 1998 also a Piper Press publication.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its funding and advisory body.