[Art exhibit] This Delicate Monster: Recent work by Michelle Handelman: Rx October 12, 2005

GALLERY HOURS: WED-THU 3-7P, FRI-SAT 5-9P
PERFORMANCES: THU 10/13 & 10/27 6-9P

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.