Multi-Channel Video Installation and Performance, 2004-2007

This Delicate Monster is a multimedia pop fable inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s 19th century collection of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal.

Handelman transposes Les Fleurs du Mal into a pop landscape, creating a haunting and hallucinatory fragmented narrative that lies somewhere between a horror film and a fashion shoot gone terribly wrong.

The project consists of several videos works, photographs and a live site-specific performance where performers sit high on the walls of the gallery space taunting and laughing at the crowd.

The exhibit becomes a sympathetic symphony of gasps, shrieks and repetitive actions, implicating the viewer into a mediated world of attraction and repulsion. 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” and “To know nothing, to teach nothing, to feel nothing, to sleep and still to sleep, this is my only wish. A base and loathsome wish, but sincere.”