During the early 1990s, San Francisco was the epicenter of body modification and gender nonconformity, with transgender pioneers like Patrick Califia and Tala Brandeis fighting for visibility, alongside the voice of a bold S/M community. Michelle Handelman’s provocative and pioneering documentary BLOODSISTERS captures these queer outlaws in their zeitgeist moment, shot on digital video with an unfiltered rawness that mirrors the activism of the era. From pushy bottoms to macho femmes, BLOODSISTERS immerses the viewer in the San Francisco leather dyke scene, shattering assumptions about gender and lesbian sexuality, while broadening the discussion about personal expressions of eroticism and their political implications. In the 1990s, BloodSisters was attacked in congress by the American Family Association for its depictions of radical lesbian sexuality. Twenty-five years later, the film has become recognized as a treasured historical document of a movement that tore down barriers of sex, gender, and activism.
MICHELLE HANDELMAN uses video, live performance and photography to make confrontational works that explore the sublime in its various forms of excess and nothingness. Her background is a study in opposites – raised during the late 60s/early 70s, Handelman split her time between Chicago, where her mother was a fixture in the art world, and Los Angeles, where her father was a player in the counterculture sex industry. Over the years Handelman has voraciously traversed both these worlds, developing a body of work that investigates ways of looking at the forbidden and revealing dark, subconscious layers of outsider agency.
In the mid 90s Handelman directed and produced the feature documentary BloodSisters (Bravo Award 1999), an in-depth look at the San Francisco Leatherdyke scene that has just been re-released by the Tribeca Film Institute’s Reframe Collection. Her videos have screened internationally including Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris; ICA, London; MIT List Visual Arts Center; Guangzhou 53 Art Museum; American Film Institute and 3LD Art & Technology Center, NYC. Her performances have been featured at Participant, Inc., NYC; Exit Art, NYC; Performa – the first biennial of visual performance; 3LD Art & Technology Center, NYC and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art.
