This Delicate Monster

"This Delicate Monster"
Recent work by MICHELLE HANDELMAN

We are pleased to announce our first exhibition with New York media artist Michelle Handelman, marking her first return to the Bay Area in three years. For this exhibition Handelman transforms the gallery with projections, live performers, and photographs from her latest project This Delicate Monster – a place where passion, obsession, fashion and ugliness collide.

This Delicate Monster is a multi-media pop fable inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil , a book of poems as succulent and darkly suave as 19th-century Paris and Baudelaire himself. Handelman transposes the Flowers of Evil into a pop landscape, creating a haunting and hallucinatory fragmented narrative that lies somewhere between conceptual art piece and pure visceral experience. Collaborating with couture fetish designer Garo Sparo, Italian noise band Larsen, and a cast of performers, the multi-screen narrative is constructed of gestures and sounds that breathe life into Baudelaire’s text such as, "No abyss compares with your bed", "condemned to an eternal laugh because I know not how to smile" "to swallow up existence with a yawn". Live performers sitting high on the walls of the gallery space taunt and laugh at the crowd, creating an abject space where meaning falls apart in a persistent and macabre performance of endurance. Like Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, this piece implicates the viewer into a mediated world of attraction and repulsion, with moments so loaded with the symbolic that they destroy meaning altogether. The exhibit becomes a sympathetic symphony of gasps, shrieks and repetitive actions that can best be described as a cross between a horror film and a fashion shoot gone terribly wrong.

Michelle Handelman’s (M.F.A. Bard College, B.F.A. SF Art Institute) video work has shown worldwide including the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art; Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris; ICA London; SF MOMA and her spectacles of post-feminist toughness at Jack the Pelican Presents, NY; Cristinerose Gallery, NY; Exit Art, NY; and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, CT. She is the director of the 1998 doc BloodSisters (Bravo Award) and has collaborated with Monte Cazazza, pioneer of the Industrial music scene, Eric Werner, co-founder of Survival Research Laboratories , Paul Miller AKA DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid , and media artist Lynn Hershman-Leeson. She has contributed to the cultural anthologies Apocalypse Culture (Feral House Press) and Inappropriate Behaviour (Serpents Tail) and teaches in the Media Studies department of the New School University.

As part of the exhibition "The Delicate Monster," Handelman will integrate a performance piece which takes place live in the gallery on opening night and Saturday October 8 from 2pm-5pm.