If you’ve ever heard the words “feminist” and “Australian contemporary artist” in the same sentence, then you’ve probably also heard the name Julie Rrap. With a career spanning more than 40 years, she’s a major figure in the art world who is known for stripping down and incorporating her own body into her multidisciplinary art practice – in which she examines representations of the female nude in art and popular culture over time. You have the chance to have an intimate encounter with Rrap’s work at the the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) with Past Continuous, a new exhibition featuring both new and past work.
“When I looked in art history books, particularly, there were lots of pictures of women – nude women mostly – and not a lot of women artists,” said Rrap, when speaking with Time Out Sydney’s Alannah Le Cross.
“At the same time I was reading people like Simone de Beauvoir, and I was just beginning that little journey of my own about what it is to be a woman in the world,” she said, also adding that at the time she was studying literature and was quite active in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement. “So I guess this show, for me, represents that back history for me… there was always this way in which the female body was always the subject, but they were never themselves a subject.”
Rrap’s landmark 1982 installation work – ‘Disclosures: A Photographic Construct’ – has been drawn from the MCA Collection for the exhibition, and this is where your journey begins. The first of Rrap’s works to be exhibited publicly (at Central Street, a former independently run gallery in Sydney’s Inner West), the work comprises over 70 photographs and self-portraits taken in the artist’s studio. Suspended in rows of opposing perspectives, the artist displayed in various states of undress, Rrap builds a dialogue in the gallery between the artist, camera and viewer – subverting the voyeurism associated with viewing the nude female body, both in and beyond the art world.
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“I'm a child of the ’60s, I’m a hippie – we could barely keep our clothes on! So I didn't have any self consciousness about that. But also, you know, because I was surrounded by performance artists, it was just part of it – people were using their bodies, not necessarily even sexually, it was more about rawness and vulnerability,” said Rrap. “It's quite funny. I had no idea that I would ever show it, I was just doing something.”
Elsewhere, in more recent works, Rrap has continued to use her body as subject – and 42 years on since her work was first seen by the public, she takes on a new lens as she considers the rules that society imposes on older women, and how we look or look away when confronted by certain bodies.
“There's something quite interesting about an older woman's body. If you look at art history, there are not many of them represented. I've been hunting, and if they are, they're very unkind representations – they're usually witches, or they’re sort of, old hags,” said Rrap.
New works in the exhibition consider the body through time, addressing both its strengths and vulnerabilities. They continue Rrap’s motifs of layering, mirroring, and doubling that are characteristic of her oeuvre, with new video works featuring self-portraits from Disclosures, four decades on. At the centre of the gallery stands the impressive sight of ‘SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders)’ (2024) – a life-size bronze sculpture cast from the artist’s body that depicts her standing on top of her own shoulders, frozen in a moment of forward motion.
It’s quite remarkable to think that so much of Rrap’s work was created in a pre-social-media time, before smartphones enabled many of us to experiment with amateur self-portraiture. However, there’s also a timeless quality to it, evoking Virginia Woolf’s rallying cry from A Room of One’s Own – that every woman deserves a physical and symbolic space that she can carve out for herself. ‘Disclosures’ is the result of Rrap hiding away in her studio in the back of an old terrace house every weekend for about two years, in between working full-time. While she didn’t consider herself a real artist at the time, there’s certainly no getting around it now – and the contemporary art world is all the richer for Julie Rrap’s continued determination to bare it all.
Curated by MCA Australia Assistant Curator Lucy Latella, Julie Rrap: Past Continuous is part of an ongoing program that presents new work by living Australian artists, drawing upon emblematic works in the MCA Collection. The exhibition is showing at the MCA, Circular Quay, until February 16, 2025. Entry is free.
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