Overstepping

source: highlike

Photographer: Julie Rrap
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source: artclassroomquestwordpress

For many years Julie Rrap has utilised photography as a deconstructive tool, a means to manipulate and challenge dominant narratives. She employs any number of photographic devices and combines photography with other mediums. ”I am less concerned with photography’s essential truthfulness than with its appearance of truth. It’s ability to simply provide information, true or false, creates an ambiguity of meaning with many conceptual possibilities. In recent times I have spoken of my practice as photo-informed. This is done to stress that critical dialogues developed within photographic practice have informed much of my thinking. Photography is a useful tool as a medium that positions itself between things: Fine Art and popular culture; the material and the technological; the real and the imaginary. It has the ability to both construct and deconstruct narrative structures. It is the master of deceptive facts and believable fictions. Photography, therefore, occupies a powerful position within contemporary visual culture as both myth-maker and myth-breaker.”

Overstepping is a large format, glossy digital image in which the artist’s feet sprout into fleshy high heels. The visual realism of the feet indicates they ‘belong to a real woman…We are simultaneously given both a sense of style and of exquisite pain. No woman who has ever worn stilettos can look at Overstepping without wincing. This single image has it all. It describes the female body and the way it is fragmented and manipulated in the interests of appearance as well as the personal cost of those transformations.

Rrap blurs the distinction between the authentic and the simulated, the real and the unreal, the true and the fake. In Overstepping, our senses are confused by the impossibility of the image we are witnessing: a convincing image of woman’s foot literally becoming a stiletto heeled shoe. The two fluidly become one, and the limitations of the physical body are transcended by the artist through digital manipulation of the original photograph of the artist’s foot. This image uses inversion to question our notions of the real, by demonstrating how easily experiences can be constructed.
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source: societadelleletterateit

Curiosamente, alla deformazione del piede femminile nelle pratiche cinesi di bendaggio corrisponde, nella cultura occidentale, la “tortura” del tacco alto. Ce lo mostra l’artista australiana Julie Rrap (1950) che lavora con vari media sul corpo femminile e la sua rappresentazione, appropriandosi ora di immagini della storia dell’arte, ora delle raffigurazioni dei mass-media. Nella serie Overstepping (2001) Rrap utilizza il taglio dell’immagine, i colori e le superfici lucide delle rivista di moda per trasformare con la fotografia digitale due piedi in un paio di scarpe con tacco a spillo. Il pensiero va al noto quadro di Magritte del 1947 la Filosofia nel Boudoir ma qui Rrap utilizza il linguaggio delle riviste di moda per suggerire uno dei modi con cui il corpo femminile è manipolato ai fini dell’apparire, in conformità a modelli estetici predefiniti e quale testimonianza degli “effetti” estremi della moda.