Rrap remakes the world

Julie Rrap is a leading and influential Australian artist who has been exhibiting since the late 1970s.

Exploring aspects of the human form, her photographs and installations are created with a beguiling wit and a determination to meet the gaze of her audiences. She once said the reason she uses her own body in her art is because it is literally “at hand”. The body for Rrap is an opportunity to explore its mischievous attributes, such as masquerade, fetish and the body double.

How do artists remake the world? According to Rrap, it is in their dreams and in “Her” image. At the Ian Potter Museum of Art there are 20 LCD screens showing 30 artists, filmed while they slept and dreamed. Faced with the decision of how to install the screens, the artist asked herself: who sleeps in the daytime? Bats – and so the videos of the sleeping artists are suspended upside down. Perhaps the most famous precursor to the sleeping figure is Andy Warhol’s film, Sleep, 1963.

Rrap’s suspended white forms also softly animate and unravel the long history of sleeping figures in marble sculpture. More specifically, this is a collaboration with artists which beckons the question of artistic process: the ways in which imagination in art is fuelled by dreams and the ways in which dreams are fulfilled by art.

In a second space a new group of sculptures, photographs and videos explore images of the artist’s own body – fragmented, digitised and animated with the playfulness of science fiction.

A large photograph depicts the artist’s pursed red lips releasing thousands of images of her own body. A video shows the artist struggling with a piece of fabric, emblazoned with two images of herself leaping into the void and dressed as Marilyn Monroe.

Thousands of these same minute figures appear in a video swarm, ricocheting in waves of blue and red, becoming part of an alternative system of intelligence. Here the real body creates a fictional world. Gazing down from above are the artist’s God-like eyes, projected on a huge scale, and artificially manipulated to change like an eclipse from a smoky yellow to a blind black.

Art is a world-making activity, and Julie Rrap shows us the ways the world turns, from the prosaic and collaborative, to the states of dream, transgression and imagination.

Exhibition is at Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, until 15 November. More details at www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au.

Victoria Lynn is Director of TarraWarra Museum of Art, and author of Julie Rrap: Body Double, MCA and Piper Press, Sydney, 2007.