Julie Rrap: Body Double

Julie Rrap is a leading Australian artist depicting the female form through her own body. She has sought to 'disclose' the human body, and unravel the ways in which it has been represented in art and elsewhere.

In photographs, videos and sculptures, this is is a performing body ' one that enacts various postures through shadow play, masquerade, mirror and mime. Rrap's works go to the heart of photography ' they occupy the zone between the documentation of reality and the artifice of invention.

Rrap's representation of the body is never comfortable. Her human figures are often dissected into parts, distorted, and at times squeezed into the stance of the artist's muse. In her sculptures, the body disappears altogether, as if it has slipped into the negative spaces of solid forms that beg to cradle flesh once again.

Rrap combines an intellectual framework with a sense of wit and works in sculpture, installation, photography and video in consistently compelling ways.

Author Victoria Lynn explores Rrap's role as 'the trickster' in her work, how she uses the 'body double', and how she oversteps the limits of bodily representation.

Published in conjunction with exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Roslyn Oxley Gallery. Includes a forward by former head of the MCA, Elizabeth Ann MacGregor.