Julie Brown-Rrap: Thief’s Journal

About the exhibition
This exhibition showed a three-part installation titled Thief’s Journal by Sydney artist Julie Rrap (then known as Julie Brown-Rrap). She was noted in the exhibition description as an artist who ‘discredits the notion of photography and painting as truthful, impartial mirrors of reality’. For this work, Brown-Rrap appropriated images belonging to such male artists as Magritte and Balthus, substituting images of her own body for the female nudes they portrayed.

The artist’s complex self-image making process was described as follows:

First, the artist projects a slide of the original paintings onto a black paper backdrop, tracing the lines and giving them a different emphasis according to the way they look through the view-finder of a camera. When the drawing is complete, she activates the shutter-delay mechanism, steps onto the paper, approximates the pose of the figure, and photographs herself. She covers a canvas with photographic emulsion and prints the negative onto it. The photograph is then painted over. The distortions and accidents occurring during the process are emphasised in the final image.

Through this installation, Brown-Rrap was seen to ‘upset the “normal” relationship between the viewing subject (the male artist) and the viewed object (the female nude)’. The unreciprocated gaze of the viewer and the viewed was seen to represent the inequality of the relationship between the two, which can be depersonalising, even degrading, to one or both. As the exhibition description concluded, this installation is ‘really about the “politics of the gaze”’.

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^{Image: Julie Brown-Rrap: Thief’s Journal 1987, detail of catalogue cover}