360 degree Self-Portrait

This video work, as moving image, suggests time as infinite through the technique of the loop. The ‘unknown’ in this work is the mystery behind the action or affect that the subject (the artist/self) undergoes. It is difficult to determine whether this person / this face, is responding to something outside or inside themselves. Are they undergoing something or perceiving something? The work is about “the things that are outside of us, our bodies, what happens inside of us and what happens to us.”  These qualities provide an entry point for the viewer to engage and question.

There is a ‘leap into the void’ that this work, '360° Self-portrait', asks of the viewer, which finds its equivalent in the famous photographic image by Yves Klein, 'La peinture de l’espace se jette dans le vide', 1960. This image ‘appears’ to document the artist leaping from a balcony or rooftop into the street below. Caught in mid flight, his image remains forever in a state of suspension. This image is also caught within history as an open question, one where the photograph acts as proof, but cultivates doubt.

This paradox resonates in '360° Degree Self-Portrait' where time and movement ‘appear’ suspended within the intensity of presence.

—Julie Rrap, July 2010

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Julie Rrap has been a major figure in Australian contemporary art for over three decades. In 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney held a major retrospective of Rrap’s work titled, ‘Body Double’ (curated by Victoria Lynn). In 1988 Rrap was included in the ‘Australian Show’, which toured to the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany and major museums in Japan. Other significant group exhibitions include ‘Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia’, which toured Japan and Korea in 1996; ‘Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968 – 2002’ at the National Gallery of Victoria (2002), ‘Turbulence: the 3rd Auckland Triennial’, Auckland, and ‘Revolutions – Forms That Turn, the 2008 Biennale of Sydney’ (curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev). Julie Rrap’s work is held in every major public collection as well as many corporate and private collections. Rrap was selected for the prestigious Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria in September 2009. Her video work, ‘360° Self Portrait’ won the ‘2009 University of Queensland National Artists' Self-Portrait Prize’. The work has also been selected by Victoria Lynn for inclusion in ‘The Trickster’, at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea. ‘360° Self Portrait’ will be Julie Rrap’s eleventh solo exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.