Loaded

Julie Rrap’s major new series of photographs, Loaded, involved casting a series of shoes in frozen coloured inks – white, yellow, blue, red, green, black – which were worn by Rrap in a performance over several weeks. The shoes became painting instruments as they melted on a large canvas leaving their mark as remnants of the artist’s evolving outfit. In a surprising inversion, the foot is privileged over the hand in an undressing of gestural abstraction and its associated myths.

In addition to the melting shoes, Rrap utilises readymade colour in the form of objects as transient accessories in the developing painting, taking the viewer through her process from white to black. As well as harnessing colour, the objects are allegorical suggestions of the artist’s presence via her absence – her expired breath, her discarded clothes etc. 

In making Loaded, Rrap combined both a ‘rational’ structure and a more intuitive element in which she let the image ‘direct’ some of the scenarios that developed. The accumulated images became the ‘key’ to the artwork.

Loaded, via its story board format, suggests that all images are loaded, never innocent. This is partly because, as art, image making becomes culture and in this transition becomes self-conscious of its secret life, the ‘loadedness’ of interpretation, context and meaning.

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