Julie Rrap: Past Continuous
If you’ve ever heard the words “feminist” and “Australian contemporary artist” in the same sentence, then you’ve probably also heard the name Julie Rrap. With a career spanning more than 40 years, she’s a major figure in the art world who is known for stripping down and incorporating her own body into her multidisciplinary art practice – in which she examines representations of the female nude in art and popular culture over time. You have the chance to have an intimate encounter with Rrap’s work at the the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) with Past Continuous, a new exhibition featuring both new and past work.
“When I looked in art history books, particularly, there were lots of pictures of women – nude women mostly – and not a lot of women artists,” said Rrap, when speaking with Time Out Sydney’s Alannah Le Cross.
“At the same time I was reading people like Simone de Beauvoir, and I was just beginning that little journey of my own about what it is to be a woman in the world,” she said, also adding that at the time she was studying literature and was quite active in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement. “So I guess this show, for me, represents that back history for me… there was always this way in which the female body was always the subject, but they were never themselves a subject.”
Rrap’s landmark 1982 installation work – ‘Disclosures: A Photographic Construct’ – has been drawn from the MCA Collection for the exhibition, and this is where your journey begins. The firs
