Julie Rrap
Artist Talk
December 4, 2015
Opening Reception for Biometric (this opening is part of VIBE2)


We are delighted to welcome Julie Rrap (Australia) who will give an Artist Talk around her practice and the work in the Biometric exhibition, 360 Degree Self Portrait.

Julie Rrap’s monumental and captivating 360 Degree Self-Portrait has been referred to as ‘uncanny shape-shifting’. What is the subject seeing or experiencing? What forces are at play here? The work suggests the effect of time and gravity on the physical body or perhaps from within. The female body and how it is represented identified and commodified has influenced and informed Rrap’s practice for decades. 360 Degree Self-Portrait received the 2009 University of Queensland national self-portrait prize in Australia.

BIO
Born 1950 Lismore New South Wales, she lives and works in Sydney New South Wales. Julie Rrap’s involvement with body art and performance in the mid 1970s in Australia continued to influence her practice as it expanded into photography painting sculpture and video in an ongoing project concerned with representations of the body. A survey of her work Julie Rrap Works 1991–1995 was held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) Melbourne and in 2007 the Museum of Contemporary Art held a major retrospective Julie Rrap: Body Double curated by Victoria Lynn. Other solo exhibitions include Remaking the World Ian Potter Museum of Art Melbourne (2015) Rrapture Newcastle Art Gallery (2014) and Julie Rrap: Off Balance’ Lismore Regional Gallery (2011). Her work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions worldwide. In 2009 her work 360° Self Portrait won the University of Queensland National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize. In 2015 she was the recipient of the Vizard Foundation Contemporary Artist Project at the Ian Potter Museum of Art Melbourne where she exhibited a new body of work Remaking the World. Monograph publications on Rrap’s work include Julie Rrap: Remaking the World published by The Ian Potter Museum of Art Victoria 2015 Julie Rrap: Body Double published by Piper Press and the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney 2007 and Julie Rrap Piper Press Sydney 1998. Rrap’s work is held in all major Australian public collections as well as many corporate and private collections in Australia and overseas.