This Delicate Monster

Thu, Oct 6
Performances Thursday October 6, 6-9PM & Saturday October 8, 2-5PM.
free

"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.

October 6 -29, 2005
Opening Reception Thursday October 6, 6:00PM-9:00PM
Performances Thursday October 6, 6:00PM-9:00PM & Saturday October 8,
2:00PM-5:00PM
GALLERY HOURS: WED-THU 3-9PM, SAT 5-9PM or by appointment

Venue:

Rx Gallery
132 Eddy Street
San Francisco, CA
415-474-7973
www.rxgallery.com

One Block from Powell BART

Additional Info:

415-756-8890
www.rxgallery.com