Cannibal Garden by Michelle Handelman

Multidisciplinary Compilation of Videos, Photographs, Etc., 1999-2000
Cannibal Garden is a project investigating hermaphroditic, self generating/self-satisfying systems within nature. It is a compilation of several of Michelle’s performance videos examining constructed identity as it mutates through digital space.
Mining sci-fi, anime and horror films for traces of psychological interactions, the project explores sex, desire and obsession, alongside large-scale digital photographs referencing futuristic plant forms and sex toys. Their Rorschach-like structure opens up a sexualized psychology between form and content; digestion and expulsion, while referencing flowers, insects and frilly sex toys.
The performative videos are humorous and grotesque, featuring Michelle playing to the lens while pursuing pleasure and excess as a single-minded activity.

Still from “Candyland”, part of Cannibal Garden by Michelle Handelman

“I once read that flowers absorb evil, and so Cannibal Garden became a metaphor for the type of self-consuming pleasure that erases pain.

A place where objects have grown out-of-scale and images consume the viewer with obsessive acts of desire and highly saturated color.

Using artifice as costume, I take moments of intense optical control and destabilize them by redirecting the gaze from the micro to the macro to the super fantastic.”

—Michelle Handelman

Videos Included

Aliendreamcord
Mini-DV, Color, Sound, Infinite Loop, 1999

Body becomes speed, symmetry becomes seduction.

Blowjob
Three-Channel Mini-DV, Color, Sound, Infinite Loop, 1999

Handelman licks and chokes, licks and chokes, turning feathers from agents of seduction into tools of repulsion.

CandyLand
Mini-DV, Color, Sound, 1999

Candyland inhabits a world of obsessive compulsion through an act of auto-erotic consumption. Using artifice as costume, contamination is contained within the lens, giving the viewer access to the visual pleasure of the performance, while distancing them from the action. Featuring music by: Orbital, and Vision Torn Apart.

I.C.U.
Mini-DV, Color, Sound, Infinite Loop, 1999

Handelman approaches the lens as the ultimate object of affection. Pulling eyelashes out of her mouth, assaulting beauty, artifice and the grotesqueness of desire.