Body double - Julie Rrap
In the darkened exhibition space of ‘Body double’ two figures lie on the floor, silicon rubber casts of the artist’s own body, one face down and the other face up. The casts are deliberately rough with the seams from the moulding process showing and do not try to emulate the perfection we associate with classical representations of the nude. Projected on to one cast at a time is the figure of a man or a woman, seeming to give life to the forms but one which can be at odds with the gender of the cast.
From time to time the projected images leave the body which they are inhabiting and roll across the floor to the other body, bringing the cast to life but sometimes also blurring its gender identity. “In one instance, a female lies face-up on the face –down sculpture, so that the bottom is transformed into a pregnant form. In another moment, a male body lies within the female form, transforming the union of image and sculpture into a hermaphroditic figure. Identities are blurred as the projected forms seamlessly transform from female to male, engaged in a process of perpetual arrival and departure.” (Lynn, pg. 91)
The change in gender in the video image occurs as the figure rolls, and the body casts perpetually become one gender or the other while retaining a female form. The speed of movement is triggered through sensors activated by the viewer’s presence. A soundtrack in the space of breathing adds to the sense of an entire space animated by the physicality and image of the human body. It is impossible for the viewer not to become caught up in this dance of gender and physicality, of the representation of form and the form our own bodies take, of the embodiment of a sense of self within the materiality of the human body. Inevitably the traditional idea of a human soul leaving the body is also suggested, as is the transience of life and human physicality. The passage of time then becomes the other key to understanding the poetics of this work.
