Michelle Handelman

"Irma Vep, The Last Breath" is a multichannel video project based on Musidora, the French silent film actress, and the character she is best known for, Irma Vep from the film Les Vampires (dir. Louis Feuillade,1915). It's a piece about living in the shadows, criminal anxiety and the relationship between the artist and her creation, both fictional and real.

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"Dorian, a cinematic perfume" is based on Oscar Wilde’s 19th century novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and its themes of decadence, narcissism and the meaning of art. I have interpreted the story and it’s queer undertones by casting Dorian as a young woman discovered by a fashion photographer, then catapulted into the world of empty celebrity. She falls under the tutelage of a famous drag queen and becomes a nightclub luminary, constantly followed by the paparazzi. These media images become the infamous portrait, grotesquely mutating as she grows more beautiful and famous, culminating in her own narcissistic destruction.

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Riffing off of Nauman's early performance tapes, Handelman chants this negative affirmation into a song of personal endearment. Simultaneously self-reflexive, self-conscious, meditative and pathetically funny.

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An attic, a giant sewing needle and an anti-gravity fairy tale of sibling rivalry. Three sisters fight over who gets the biggest phallus in this post-feminist animation-infused playground by media artist Michelle Handelman. If Hans Christian Anderson got a sex change, surfed the porn sites, and hung with the freaky girls, his stories would look like this.

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From pushy bottoms to macho femmes, Bloodsisters is an A–Z documentary guide that takes an in-depth look at the San Francisco Leatherdyke scene during the mid-nineties.

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A diverse program of films and videos by various artists who challenge conventional representations of gender, family and sexuality, curated by Tom Kalin for Drift Distribution.

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An experimental narrative about the Spanish inquisition and how it still permeates our current psychosexual cultural milieu.

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A woman imitating a man, imitating himself. Using the cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, I edited this film using experimental out-takes and guided purely by intuition. The film sat around for a year without a soundtrack. Then, due to a homophobic incident, I plotted my revenge, locked myself in a sound booth and let loose. A revenge film that will have you falling out of your seat.

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Working from the premise that there is no such thing as safe sex, this film is designed as an arcane storybook with each sexual act being contained within a 100 ft.-roll of film. A structural film with content, each roll contains layers of sexual illusion amid subliminal messages created by in-camera effects. The soundtrack starts from a single cat's purr and is manipulated with each sexual act, creating a climatic fever sounding like a buzzing chainsaw.

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