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 looking back at her, she recounts, a woman she understood to be her future self. In telling the story now, it is as clear as when she first experienced it, as if the memory collapses the stretch of time between then and now. This sense of the past speaking to the present, and of the present to the past, energises Rrap’s recent work, which comprises performative drawings, video, and a 400-kilogram bronze sculpture. The body and performativity are still at the centre of Rrap’s work, but these works are not only about the body changing over time. They are about what it means to show the body in different media across a lifetime and the effects that these media have upon a viewer.
Julie Rrap creates her work at pace when the endpoint is in sight, working from her studio and home in the inner west of Sydney. She often collaborates with bronze casters at the, 1999, in her father’s honour. He sold insect zappers and neon signs, and depicts the outline of a woman leaning back with legs open and an insect zapper between her legs. The work refers back to Gustave Courbet’s painting , 1866, but renders the form in fluorescent neon tubing, fusing the art historical with the contemporary.
