Julie Rrap – Remaking the World

Julie Rrap_Remaking the World_detailAn exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at Melbourne University by Julie Rrap, one of Australia’s most intriguing mid-career artists, will feature a night time video projection on the facade of the Museum.

The 10 x 4 metre video projection,  Remaking the World: artists’ dreaming features 30 contemporary Australian artists sleeping, including Rrap herself, exploring the idea that visual artists ponder the real world and remake it through their own dreaming, perceptions and artistic realizations.

While these thoughts are not immediately tangible, the diverse creative output of contemporary artists are in effect physical manifestations of dreaming and its possibilities, and the artists’ ‘remaking the world’ through this imaginative unconscious state.

Inside the Museum, in the major immersive installation, one gallery, Remaking the World: artists’ dreaming is transformed into an ‘asleep’ world, while the second, Remaking the World: in her image, becomes the ‘awake’ world.

Remaking the World: in her image expresses a playful counterpoint to the ‘invisibility’ of the creative process both explored and embodied in the ‘dreaming’ part of the exhibition.  Rrap, as the central protagonist and agent, rebuilds the world with her body, using a series of simple actions to convey a sense of the unexpected and of different possibilities.

Aluminium sculptures of the artist’s hands, scattered throughout the exhibition space, perform playful vernacular gestures, such as whistling, peeping and pointing, while a series of large scale colour photographs show confetti-like pieces of Rrap’s own body streaming from her lips. These works are drawn from a series of performances of throwing cloth images into the air, which also form the basis for several of the video works in the exhibition.

Remaking the World is a playful and irreverent culmination of the artist’s work to date,” says Kelly Gellatly, Ian Potter Museum of Art Director. “Bringing together ambitious video installation, sculpture and photography in an exhibition experience that investigates society’s stereotyping, assumptions and misconceptions about artists and the creative process, while highlighting the way in which the work of contemporary artists continues to push boundaries and to encourage us to both think of and experience our world in different ways.”

Julie Rrap. Remaking the World
The Ian Potter Museum of Art – The University of Melbourne, Swanston Street, Carlton
Exhibition continues to 15 November 2015
Free entry

The 10 x 4 metre video projection will take place on the façade of the Museum from 6.00pm each evening until 31 July. For more information, visit: www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au for details.

Image: Julie Rrap, Remaking the World #1, 2015 (detail) –  digital print 150 x 450 cm. Courtesy the artist, Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney