In her latest performance, "The Adventures of Lucky M: AIM," presented at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, she poses as future-forward anti-heroine Lucky M and shoots canvases full of acrylic in an action-packed showdown. And in her multimedia installation, "Cannibal Garden," recently shown at Cristinerose Gallery, which explores the relationship of the synthetic to the organic, monitors project images of her nakedly crawling toward gemlike fetishistic objects or mouthing sweet nothings into the camera.

For live performances, Handelman usually starts with a mood, then works on sketches and the costumes. She videotapes herself in action, and watches for clues on how to hold her body and what works visually. She describes her process: "There will be . . . one or two walk-through rehearsals, but after that it's all live improvisation dictated by the moment. I love the fall into the abyss!"

Among her past filmmaking credits, Handelman produced and directed BloodSisters, a feature length documentary on the LeatherDyke scene in San Francisco. Winner of the 1999 Bravo Award, the expose played at over fifty film festivals, with TV broadcasts in England and Germany. BloodSisters continues to educate viewers on the motivations behind this radical sex subculture.

Between 1990 and 1995, she collaborated with Monte Cazazza, a pioneer of the Industrial Culture movement. Their series of films, photographs, and sculptures explored the sociopolitical confines of radical sexuality, using images from the Spanish Inquisition and Japanese bondage ("Japabon") magazines.

Cazazza's work and his affiliations with Throbbing Gristle, Survival Research Laboratories, and ReSearch Publications galvanized the Modern Primitives movement, allowing it to explode in San Francisco. Handelman's collaborations with him also became an inherent component.

"More than any specific information that Monte shared with me, it was his unconditional love and support which gave me the confidence to grow and explore my own work," she recognizes. Without Cazazza, she probably would never have had the chance to meet inspirational artists, musicians, and thinkers who brought constant challenges to the Status Quo.

She counts among other influences the poetry of Pasolini, Baudelaire, Artaud; horror classics Frankenstein and Dracula; the films of Hitchcock, Argento, and Kubrick; sexy sci-fi like Barbarella (1968) and Flash Gordon (1980); the shrewd campiness of John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Irving Klaw; go-go dancers; Dada, and Zen.

Her work may be considered subversive. "My motivation has never been to shock," Handelman claims. "It has always been personal, testing my own boundaries."

Says Handelman, "I've always loved those moments where there's a break in the diegesis . . . when the character breaks the fourth wall."

She sees it as an attack on the rules of the medium. "Everyone should challenge their mediums because it forces the viewer to challenge themselves in how they process and absorb information. It's cinematic rebellion."

With her own art, Handelman represents what she refers to as the "holy trinity"—sex, death, and power—and believes that the media have changed, but its obsessive commitment to personal exploration of excessive desire and regurgitating consumption is a constant. She quotes William Blake: "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."

In Cannibal Garden for example, Handelman depicts the idea of taking in so much that one has no choice but to grow to accommodate it. The desire for physical gratification plays itself out in a closed hermaphroditic environment where she is both subject and object.

Cannibal Garden features her over-the-top, digitally-produced cyber-sexual images that consume the viewer with their sharp-edged candy color. While she may violently choke on, then purge feathers that quietly stream from her mouth in one video, her prints of carnivorous flowers, reminiscent of insects and frilly sex toys, line gallery walls like watchful prayer scrolls.

Recognizing this dialectic, she regards the loud and brash versus the silent or quiet as two sides of the same coin. "Silence can be as deafening as Chaos when it pushes you up against a wall inside yourself, forcing you to sink or swim . . . and neither gives an easy narrative which placates the viewer into passive mediocrity. I want viewers to be shaken in some way, above all, to question."

Comparing the idea of subject as object to an illusion created, during sex, she elaborates, "My boyfriend and I were making love one night and we found ourselves in such a position that the angle of his penis inside me . . . felt like it was attached to me, and I was fucking him . . . We both felt it. It was physical, psychological, this complete gender flip which had nothing to do with anything as obvious as role playing. I would like my work to have that effect. To suspend belief in all that is readily known."

Whether it be through speed, sound, or digital animation, Handelman tries for mechanical, digital, and synthesized versions of organic movements and reality-based representations. She wants the viewer to subconsciously perceive the anomaly, without necessarily being able to name it, allowing a personal entry point for meaning.

As bold as her portrayals, Handelman did not start showing her pieces, suprisingly, until she was in her late twenties. She believes that life is always about jockeying for position inside or outside various power structures, and trying to find a position with the least degree of compromise.

"From the beginning I had problems with the elitist structure of the art world so my attitude was 'Fuck 'em, this game is meaningless . . . why bother.' Somewhere . . . that changed to 'Fuck 'em, this game is meaningless . . . why not!'"

She admits to reaching this level of understanding out of personal desperation. "I realized it wasn't about me making an object and putting it out in the world for sale; it was about me putting myself on the line . . . Putting yourself out there is the biggest risk . . . making friends with fear."

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.