Michelle Handelman

Michelle Handelman: These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves includes the artist’s new video trilogy, The Pandemic Series (2020-2021). This series is comprised of These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves (The Lockdown); Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression (The Uprising); and Claiming The Liminal Space (The Aftermath), which was recently completed and is debuting on MMoCA’s website.

Candyland is one of a series of studio performances from the project "Cannibal Garden" that examines the constructed identity as it mutates through digital space. Using artifice as costume, mining sci-fi, anime and horror films for psychological interactions, Handelman slowly crawls across the floor – the artist as obsessive devouring action machine – consuming pure color in in an act of auto-eroticism.

Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression (2020) is a continuation of the project These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves which I started at the beginning of the pandemic. It recontextualizes characters from my previous works into hypnotic visual essays about the transfiguring of interiority during periods of isolation and fear. "As lockdown continues, and fear of the pandemic gives way to the rage of the political uprising, it’s become crucial to read this moment from a perspective of racial inequality and capitalist fascist oppression. In the words of critical theorist Jill Casid, “May none of us rest as we live our dying. May we not forget but actually do the work of reckoning with the still uncounted, of the crimes of the endless war we are still in.”

Michelle Handelman’s new work, THESE UNRULY AND UNGOVERNABLE SELVES (2020), recontextualizes characters from her previous works into a hypnotic visual essay about the transfiguring of interiority during periods of isolation and fear. It takes as its starting point the current coronavirus pandemic and filters it through theorist Jill Casid’s writings on the necrocene, and Walter Benjamin's writings on identifying the difference between threshold and boundaries. Handelman's characters, who each have already struggled with existential questions of belonging and fear in her projects DORIAN, A CINEMATIC PERFUME (2009/11); IRMA VEP, THE LAST BREATH (2013/15); and HUSTLERS & EMPIRES (2018), are juxtaposed with found images and texts sourced during the pandemic to take on a new form that both denies and struggles with containment.

A lonely and elderly widower struggles to come to terms with the loss of his wife and the circumstances surrounding her death. When he visits her grave, he encounters a little girl who shows him the path to healing and fills him with hope.

"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.

"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.

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.

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.

This docudrama presents the history of the telephone, updated and told from the point of view of a character who uses the screen as both a connection to intimacy and a condom for safe sex.

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.

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.