However much you try to avert your eyes, Julie Rrap forces you to look back. Past Continuous, Rrap’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, challenges the matrix of female representation in art by turning the viewer’s gaze back on itself. Over several decades, Rrap has employed a multidisciplinary approach to redirect conversations on ageing, desire, and beauty—many of which collide in this retrospective. 

Born in Lismore in 1950, Rrap's life was non-traditional from the outset. Raised in an itinerant family of seven, she recalls moving frequently around New South Wales before settling on a farm in Nerang for most of her childhood. She attributes this nomadic lifestyle to instilling a sense of unbridled freedom during her youth, which would develop into a scepticism for social norms (hence her adoption of the reversal of her last name, 'Parr') and institutionalised art-making. 

Rrap’s career has taken her abroad, notably to a residency in Belgium in 1986. Here, her disillusionment with Europe’s supposed liberalism grew as she observed the glaring lack of women artists represented in public galleries and exhibitions. Drawn back to Australia, where artists like Tracey Moffatt were gaining traction, Rrap returned to photography as a mode for critiquing systemic exclusion. 

Often describing herself as a trickster, Rrap delights in subverting the dynamics of art-viewing, manipulating the roles of subject and viewer to challenge and engage with feminist discourse. Her works Disclosures: A Photographic Construct (1982), a series comprising 79 images, and the quasi-surreal Overstepping (2001), depicting a woman's bare feet morphed into classic pumps, are considered foundational to contemporary feminist art in Australia. Her visual language, featuring direct symbols of objectification and a hijacking of the viewer's gaze, engages in discourse surrounding the female body, gendered performance, and the deconstruction of female objectification in western art. 

Positioned at the crossroads of subject and object, Rrap wields the self-portrait as a tool to reclaim agency and destabilise the role of the female nude. Since the beginning of her career, Rrap has probed the societal bifurcation underlying representations of the female body: either it is visible or invisible, or idealised or dismissed. As Rrap opines in an interview with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, “I don't know whether attitudes to body images have changed, to be honest. There's bodies that we want to look at and there's bodies that we want to turn away from... We do live in a time where women are speaking out about these differences, and I think that this show tries to bring that discussion up.” In her digital self-portraits like Time Passing Through Me and Mirror Talk, eyes blown up to alien-esque proportions momentarily replace her own before reverting to normal. This phenomenon occurs in a second or two, leaving us uncertain about what exactly we are witnessing. The optical play makes us question Rrap’s self-image as much as Rrap questions it herself. 

In a 2010 essay for Aesthetica Magazine, art critic Niamh Coghlan dissects the photograph as “an inherently erotic object”—one that transforms the ephemeral human form into a tangible artefact. Coghlan writes, “Thus the inanimate object became somewhat real and desirable. In much the same way that the camera’s lens captured this human element, so does the audience through the act of looking.” In Disclosures: A Photographic Construct, Rrap parodies the voyeurism attributed to viewing the nude female body. Scantily clad in either sheer tights or G-strings—and oftentimes entirely nude—Rrap calls attention to the relationship between the watcher and the watched. Seemingly aware that she is being ‘perceived’, Rrap sometimes looks over her bare shoulder with a raised brow or coy smile. Some photographs appear to be taken before a caricaturist vanity—a mirror presents an alternate Rrap and repeating self-portraits appear like bathroom tiles behind it. In every photo, Rrap wears her camera around her neck, eye-level with the viewer, so both viewer and subject coexist passively and complicit.

At the centre of the exhibition is the sculpture SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders). The sculpture comprises two bronze castings of Rrap: one poised in an awkward contrapposto, the other precariously balanced atop her shoulders. Regarding its inception, she explains, “There’s all those expressions about standing on the shoulders of giants, so obviously it's about passing the baton and the fact that it's a woman saying, 'I have to stand on my own shoulders.' It’s as much a performance work as it is a sculpture.” SOMOS disrupts our traditional perception  of bronze sculpture and its association with classical ideals. By presenting an older female body, Rrap lampoons the pursuit of the divine ideal, once represented by the perfect male form in ancient civilisations as the paragons of virility and youth. 

On the far wall of the exhibit, Drawn In unfolds across a triptych screen display, presenting footage captured by GoPros attached to Rrap's head, arm, and stomach. The video shows Rrap nestled on the floor of her studio, sketching abstract arcs and ribbons with charcoal. “This is like a performance platform... You see my body fractured, but you also see my studio environment,” Rrap explains. “For me, that's very important because the whole conceptual basis of Past Continuous started from working with Disclosures, which was made in 1982, and the fact that I was using myself nude in those days in that work.”

Drawn In serves as an experimental evolution of the nude portraiture explored in Disclosures. Through its perspectival manipulation and video format, the work shifts focus away from the physicality of Rrap's body and onto its actions and creative potential. While the screens often centre on her stomach or legs, as she adjusts to find the ideal vantage point, the sweeping motion of her arms and the hiss of charcoal scraping paper force viewers to look beyond her body and toward the act she is undertaking. 

Past Continuous continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art until 23 February. Free admission