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UID:Indybay-73463
SEQUENCE:73463
CREATED:20050815T204800Z
DESCRIPTION:"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.  \n https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2005/08/15/73463.php
SUMMARY:This Delicate Monster
LOCATION:Rx Gallery  132 Eddy Street (Mason)  SF/CA 94201
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2005/08/15/73463.php
DTSTART:20051007T010000Z
DTEND:20051007T040000Z
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