Video, Photographs, Sculpture, 1992-1994

In the early 1990s with her project Blood, Guts and Beauty, Handelman created a body of photographic works that slyly evoked collage through the use of performative gestures — cutting, stitching, burning, tying — in order to document the rupture of the feminized body on and in the photographic forms that typically seek to contain them within the patriarchal gaze.

Shooting on 4x5” polaroid black & white negative film, Handelman would cut and rework the photo prints by hand, even sewing on the photo fragments themselves before re-photographing the resulting collages as one-of-a-kind polaroids themselves.

Created on the heels of Handelman’s ground-breaking earlier experimental works in film, like A History of Pain (1992), and as she developed what would become the queer documentary classic BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes & Sadomasochism (1995), the photographic experiments in this body of work document an intimate route of investigation into the inquiries and undergrounds already animating the early turns of the artist’s practice. These prints work in reference to a wide array of aesthetic and historical concerns in Handelman’s practice as an emerging artist: from torture techniques of the Spanish Inquisition, histories of medieval religious (particularly Catholic) dominance and oppression, the psycho-sexual nuances of pain and pleasure, the medical gaze and its apprehension of queer and female bodies, especially in the midst of the AIDS crisis; to her personal involvement in San Francisco’s radical queer, body modification, and BDSM undergrounds of the 1990s.

Recently exhibited in the exhibition It Is a Painful Thing to Be Alone: We are But One at DOX Centre for Contemporary Art Prague, alongside works by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Hans Bellmer, Pierre Molinier, Annie Sprinkle, and William Burroughs.