JULIE RRAP: Past Continuous @ MCA

"At the beginning, my work was critiqued through self-conscious feminism. Now, I don’t know how it will be received. And when I have used a body it’s been my own, but you don’t find out much about me in that personal sense. You just see a body moving through time. I also think that this show is as much about time as it is about a body. I show a body through time."

Head to Art Guide to read a fantastic interview with Julie Rrap by Lauren Carroll Harris. In a conversation Rrap discusses her current survey ‘Past Continuous’ at the MCA, which exhibits ‘Disclosures’ with newer works that consider the cultural invisibility of the ageing female body.
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Read the full interview here >


Julie Rrap: Past Continuous
📅 28 June 2024 – 16 February 2025
📍Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

JULIE RRAP featured in Artist Profile

Ahead of the artist's solo exhibition ‘Past Continuous’, opening in June at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, ARTIST PROFILE has devoted a cover story to the astounding 40-year career of JULIE RRAP.

"Julie Rrap was in her late teens and living in a share house in South Brisbane when she and a group of friends took magic mushrooms. An image she hallucinated while studying her reflection in a glass windowpane at night has never left her. It was the face of an older woman she understood to be her her future self..."

Read more of Lilian Cameron’s cover story, accompanied by Anna Kučera’s exclusive portraits, in Issue 67 of Artist Profile.

JULIE RRAP Interviewed by Jennifer Higgie

Julie Rrap interviewed in Ocular by Jennifer Higgie. In the interview Rrap discusses the evolution of her latest commission - a double cast of her body in bronze - and evaluates its place amongst four decades of feminist practice.

Rrap is the recipient of the 2024 Melbourne Art Foundation Commission. Her work, titled 'SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders)', is a life-sized bronze sculpture that will be unveiled at Melbourne Art Fair next week, before travelling to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) where it will be included in Rrap's solo show, 'Past Continuous', opening in June 2024, and later to its permanent home in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Read the article here >

JULIE RRAP work 'Drawn Out' acquired by the National Gallery of Australia

Drawn out (2022) is one of Julie Rrap’s most recent performative self-portraits, the latest in a performative project that began almost fifty years ago.
 
The work, which is in effect a life drawing, comprises a video-performance of Rrap – shot from above, naked and holding a stick of Conté crayon – drawing on a large sheet of paper, moving under instruction of an unseen supervisor. Over a 12-minute period, Rrap’s body and the sheet of paper become covered in black marks as artist, body, sheet and drawing merge in a neat riposte to the way the genre of the nude, and life drawing in particular, usually position the artist and the naked subject. Together, the drawing and the video-performance produce a compelling, feminist self-portrait that is at once poetic and full of pathos. Key to the work’s disruptive power is the fact that this is the body of a 72-year-old woman, whose body we have looked at in the process of making art and ageing since the late 1970s.

JULIE RRAP finalist in the 2023 Dobell Drawing Prize

Congratulations to JULIE RRAP, who is a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize 2023.

National Art School presents the Dobell prize, which celebrates contemporary drawing.

Rrap’s video work ‘DRAW OUT’ is a brilliant investigation of drawing ‘the nude’:

“The drawing is a kind of haptic expression as a naked Julie Rrap rolls back and forth over paper secured to the floor. Here she marks the parameters of her body in charcoal. She can’t actually see her body as one entity in this process, it is not an object of her gaze. What we see is the writing and erasing of a body in pieces, a fragmented body, a body that wears the erasure of the drawing on its skin.” @annemarsh56, 2022

All finalists will be on show at the NAS Gallery until 10th June 2023.

JULIE RRAP, ‘Drawn Out’, 2022, video, 12 min.

JANET LAURENCE Artist Talk 'Artists on the Ice: Interpreting the Poetics of Antartica'

ARTISTS' TALK

Across an evening of storytelling, performance and conversation, JANET LAURENCE will join a panel of four exceptional artists who have documented the power and beauty of Antarctica.

Moderated by the wonderful JULIE RRAP, in her role as Director of Sydney College of the Arts, this talk at the University of Sydney is not to be missed! Other panellists include Alice Giles AM, Professor Jean McNeil, and Dr Diana Chester.

Thursday, 20 April 2023, 6PM. This is a free event, but registration is essential, and seats are going fast! Register on the @sydney_uni website.

JULIE RRAP features in Harper's Bazaar Australia

"[There] is this invisibility around the ageing female body, and it almost sends the message that a post-reproduction body doesn’t have any purpose.”

Early in 2022, Rrap exhibited her new video series DRAWN OUT at ARC ONE for the first time. This significant body of work halted audiences in their tracks:

“I think it’s the first show I’ve done where people, both male and female, were just completely absorbed by watching these videos,” she says. “It was almost like they were hungry to see this footage of an older woman drawing herself naked.”

Visit ARC ONE Gallery today to see this powerful piece in our Viewing Rooms.

JULIE RRAP 'Hairline Crack' Installed at AGNSW

Julie Rrap, 'Hairline crack', 1992, acrylic glass and hair, Installation dimensions variable.

It is fantastic to see JULIE RRAP'S key work 'Hairline Crack', 1992, installed among the permanent collection display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 

Rrap first presented 'Hairline crack' in the 9th Biennale of Sydney. From a distance, the artwork resembles a black line drawn on the wall, evoking, perhaps, the work of Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner or other artists associated with minimalism. On closer inspection, however, it is quickly discovered that the line is in fact made from an unruly excess of human hair.

The work might be seen to meditate on the tension between the organic and the synthetic or between order and chaos. The perfectly straight, level line reveals itself to be disrupted by something organic and unpredictable; a part of our bodies associated with beauty that is also cut and discarded.

JOHN McDONALD on JULIE RRAP at the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art

John McDonald published a perceptive review in the Sydney Morning Herald today, writing on Sebastian Goldspink's "pioneering" curation of the current Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at AGSA, which includes a focus on JULIE RRAP. Importantly McDonald pays homage to the late, great artist Hossein Valamanesh and visionary philanthropist Neil Balnaves, who are both dearly missed by friends and colleagues in Australia and abroad.

McDonald concludes with glowing praise of JULIE RRAP's installation, writing,

Julie Rrap, now one of the elders in this group, takes a more direct approach, with a multi-channel video installation called Write Me (2021-22), which features 26 images of her own face, laid out like the letters on a keyboard ... One can only admire Rrap’s bravery in creating so many self-portraits in which she has added years and wrinkles to her own face. It’s simultaneously an embrace and a defiance of the ageing process. In the context of this Biennial, in which the older artists seem to have produced the best, most coherent work, it’s also a testament to the value of experience.

READ MORE here

New interview with JULIE RRAP

JULIE RRAP recently spoke with Kerrie O’Brien from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald about her photographic series ‘Blow Back’, currently on view at the Centre for Contemporary Photography. This series continues her observations on the representation of women in art and society ——“In advertising, women often have their eyes closed and their mouths slightly open, it’s like this vacant entry point.”

“I always argue that the portrait is always more about the person looking at it than the person being photographed,” Rrap shared in the interview, “When you photograph somebody, it’s like this awkward moment when you have this existential crisis about who you are...while a portrait carries all this weight, it’s just a moment in time. Photography captures a fraction of a second of you but fixes you in time… They could be thinking about what they had for breakfast."

Read the full interview here. ‘Blow Back' is on display Centre for Contemporary Photography as part of the exhibition ‘We, Us, Them: CCP x Belfast Exposed’ until 17 April.

JULIE RRAP at the ADELAIDE BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART

JULIE RRAP’s newly commissioned and major installation, Write me, 2021, is currently on display in the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Free/State at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

“For Julie Rrap, technology, albeit still fraught, may ultimately provide us with a space for shared experience and accountability. Write Me (2021) examines the social contract of the public sphere. In a career that has often returned to the body as a site of action and politics, recent times have reduced Rrap to a constrained and warped vision of their familiar face. 26 times over, across a keyboard shaped grid, with its familiar, specific alignments, play out 26 versions of the artists face, each representing a letter of the alphabet.”

— Bradley Vincent, AGSA.

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Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: ‘Free/State’ is on view until 5 June.

Learn more via @agsa.adelaide bio or visit

Art Guide interviews JULIE RRAP

JULIE RRAP, Drawn Out [installation view at ARC ONE], 2022, video, 12 minutes.

Art Guide writer Briony Downes sat down with JULIE RRAP to have a conversation on women’s liberation, feminist representations and the inspiration of her new video work ‘Drawn Out', which was a highlight of her recent solo exhibition at ARC ONE.

“I imagined it as a playful gesture where the traditional nude female life model draws herself. Now, seeing Secret Strategies, Ideal Spaces together with Drawn Out, I think there is a fantastic conversation across time; not only because my body is 35 years older but because it has liberated me from having to perform historical works. Now I am simply drawing for myself. The active quality of the video also animates the stillness of the early photographs.”

READ MORE in Julie Rrap on women’s liberation, performance and being a trickster

JULIE RRAP AWARDED FELLOWSHIP IN NSW GOVERNMENT

Congratulations to Julie Rrap, who is one of five successful fellows in the NSW Government's Fellowship program!
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The New Dimensions: NSW Visual Arts (Established) Fellowship will support Julie Rrap with funding to allow her to focus on a self-directed professional development program, and also to undertake an additional project or acquisition commission from the MCA. This marks the third year of a partnership between Create NSW and MCA for the New Dimensions: NSW Visual Arts (Established) Fellowship.

The opportunity for Julie Rrap to develop a new body of work and program of research with the Fellowship is significant. This research and artwork will question how we “look” or “look away” when confronted by certain bodies. This is a very timely project for Rrap and an extension of a meaningful practice centred around challenging and questioning traditional expressions of the female body.

More information >

Portrait of Julie Rrap in her studio by Jacquie Manning⁠

Portrait of Julie Rrap in her studio by Jacquie Manning⁠

JULIE RRAP CURATES 'THE OTHER PORTRAIT' AT UTS

Julie Rrap & Cherine Fahd, Give and Take [video stills], 2021, 4 channel video work;

Julie Rrap & Cherine Fahd, Give and Take [video stills], 2021, 4 channel video work;

Curated by Julie Rrap and Cherine Fahd, The Other Portrait has just opened across UTS Gallery and SCA Gallery.

Featuring new work by Julie Rrap, this exhibition brings together work by artists who have an established relationship to the concept and traditions of portraiture. Through existing and newly commissioned works, the exhibition provokes a new analysis of the self and the other and examines the ways artists draw on their bodies, families, communities, cultures and experiences to underscore the paradoxes of subjectivity. Located across two spaces – UTS Gallery and SCA Gallery – The Other Portrait proposes the self and the institution as sites in conversation.

More information >

PANEL DISCUSSION
Join Julie Rrap, Cherine Fahd, Rachel Kent, Lee Wallace and Patrick Pound for an afternoon exhibition viewing and discussion moderated by Stella Rosa McDonald. 

Tickets to panel discussion >

READ Art Guide REVIEW >

JULIE RRAP'S FULL SERIES 'PERSONA AND SHADOW' AT NGA

JULIE RRAP was interviewed by Brisbane Times about her series ‘Persona and Shadow’ which is now on show in ‘Know My Name’ at the NGA.

When Julie first showed ‘Persona and Shadow’ in 1984, two of the works were acquired my the NGA. Last year, the remaining seven were obtained so that the full suite may hang in ‘Know My Name’. “You think of the whole series as one set of work”, says Julie, “so it’s significant for me, and I think for the institution, to collect substantial bodies of work like that by women artists."

These works were made after Rrap returned from Europe having seen two major contemporary art exhibitions where only one female artist was represented amongst approximately 80 men. In the photographs, Rrap acts out imagery from paintings by Edvard Munch in an investigation of the stereotypical depiction of women in art and, more widely, in society.

Read the full interview with Julie here.

'Know My Name' (Part 1) continues until 4 July 2021.

JULIE RRAP INTERVIEWED ON 'THE ART SHOW'

For those that missed the insightful interview with Julie Rrap on Wednesday, this week’s ‘The Art Show’ is now available to stream via the ABC Listen App and on the web HERE >⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Julie reflects on her formative years as a young artist living in Sydney and Europe, and using her own body in her art practice. “It’s not an identity thing - I’m not an artist who’s trying to reveal something about myself. I’ve often spoken about what I do as more of a trickster, I act as a kind of vehicle,” she says. “When I see myself in an image, it’s almost like the third person - it goes through this transformative process in the making of art. It’s a representation, it’s not me.”

Listen back to hear about Julie’s time working for photographer John Delacour, the evolution of her ‘Overstepping’ concept, her interest in Cindy Sherman’s use of masquerade, and the importance of female role models in the art world.

Swipe through for images of the works Julie refers to in the conversation!