Grate Expectations
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday January 11, 2008
Julia Rrap isn't afraid to play dress-up in body double. TRACEY CLEMENT reports.
FEMINISM has been many things to many people. Yet pop culture's stereotypical images of female flesh - from music clips with women shaking their spandex-clad bums to domestic TV divas touting cleaning products - can lead people to wonder if feminism has been forgotten. Artist Julie Rrap describes this phenomenon as "part of a weird kind of amnesia". Her exhibition, Body Double, is a cultural wake-up call, a potent reminder that women have options beyond what we see on television.Body Double scans 25 years of Rrap's career as an innovative photographer and multimedia sculptor. Rrap caught the tail end of old-school feminism in 1982 with her first solo show, Disclosures: A Photographic Construct, a collection of provocative self-portraits. She has been riding its wave and getting her gear off ever since. Yet there's more to Rrap's art than nudity and hardline gender politics. As she says: "I also just make things. I don't go around with a textbook in my head."Some of the things she makes are mesmerising. Her most recent work, Body Double, combines projected figures moving like graceful dancers, with headless, rubbery white casts of Rrap's own body. The beauty of youth and age are all mixed up in Body Double, a challenging cocktail that provides a tasty alternative to the stereotypes of cardboard cut-out people.JULIE RRAP: BODY DOUBLE Museum of Contemporary Art, 140 George Street, The Rocks, 9245 2400. Daily, until January 28.
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald