signs and symbols

April 15 - May 15, 2021

Opening Online: Thursday, April 15, 6pm
Closing: Saturday, May 15, 6pm

signs and symbols is pleased to present Irma Vep, The Last Breath, a video exhibition by Michelle Handelman as part of the gallery’s series of online-only solo presentations of video works. Coinciding with the opening of the exhibition, Handelman will release a new limited print edition from this project.

Handelman writes:

"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.

"Irma Vep and Musidora are played by Zackary Drucker (TRANSPARENT) and Flawless Sabrina (THE QUEEN), two artists whose identities transgress the border of art and life. Together they have developed a relationship that documents a cultural evolution of gender.

"Musidora was an early 20th century feminist who took control of her career, not only acting, but also producing/directing films and theater. She was an artistic force of her time, producing several works by her lover Colette and having many documented affairs with both men and women. After financing dried up for her projects she lived in relative obscurity until her death in Paris, 1957. In her later years she worked the ticket booth of the Cinematheque Francaise, where few people ever knew that the woman selling them their movie tickets was France’s beloved vamp of the silver screen.

"In Feuillade’s film, Irma Vep is not really a vampire but part of a gang of underground jewel thieves. She spends much of the film in black catsuit slinking around hallways and scaling rooftops as she robs upper class Parisians. She is a trickster; cunning and vulnerable, a woman alone among many men.

"Irma Vep, The Last Breath takes up motifs from the silent movie such as gazes, affected body language and the figure of the masked woman. It is shot on a starkly illuminated set that makes space for anxious projections of desire on the void that is Irma Vep — a space between genders, between vamps of the silent era and the contemporary queer — smashing the shiny veneer to reveal dark, subconscious layers of fluid identity."

To purchase an edition of Handelman's new print, please visit our online shop.

*Please note that Handelman’s video will be viewable online from Thursday, April 15 at 6:00pm until Saturday, May 15 at 6:00pm. Following the end of the exhibition, the video will only be accessible via private link and password. We trust that given our current circumstances, everyone will act in good faith and good will, understanding that these are primary artworks by our artists that are collected and which would otherwise be password protected.

michelle handelman uses video, text and performance to make hypnotic moving image installations that push against the boundaries of gender, race and sexuality, investigating philosophical questions of existence about the things we collectively fear and deny: sex, death, chaos. She is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee and the recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been shown widely in such venues as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Pompidou Centre, Paris; ICA, London; Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum; PERFORMA, Guangzhou 53 Art Museum, China; PARTICIPANT, INC, NYC; Lincoln Center; REDCAT, The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent shows include Hustlers & Empires, a commission with SFMOMA (2018); Irma Vep, The Last Breath, featuring Zackary Drucker (TRANSPARENT) and Flawless Sabrina (THE QUEEN); Marking Time: 50 Years of Video Art, curated by Michael Rush, Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum (2015); and Irreverent, curated by Jennifer Tyburzcy, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York (2015). Her work Beware The Lily Law, a moving image installation on transgender inmates, has been on permanent display at the Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia since 2011 and was featured in the exhibition Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System, curated by Risa Puleo, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2019).