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Michelle Handelman: "Dorian, a cinematic perfume"

Presented by Arthouse at the Jones Center at Arthouse at the Jones Center

January 29-March 20, 2011

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Michelle Handelman’s Dorian, a cinematic perfume is a four-channel video installation based on Oscar Wilde’s famous Victorian novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the novel’s themes of decadence, narcissism, beauty and the grotesque. Handelman has reinterpreted the story and its queer undertones by casting Dorian as a young woman discovered by a fashion photographer, then catapulted into the world of high celebrity. Dorian falls under the tutelage of a famous drag queen and becomes a nightclub luminary, constantly followed by the paparazzi. Her media image becomes the infamous portrait, grotesquely mutating as she grows more beautiful and famous, culminating in her own narcissistic destruction.

 

Handelman’s actors are well-known personalities from the New York drag and burlesque scene and blur the line between performance and reality by playing versions of themselves. Sequinette, a young gender-bending female drag queen, performs the title role. Armen Ra, who plays Dorian’s flamboyant mentor, Lord H, is a renowned theremin player and drag performer. Quin Charity, a media artist, portrays Basil, the artist who discovers Dorian, while K8 Hardy, a performance artist and co-creator of the queer feminist art collective Lesbians to the Rescue (LTTR) is Dorian’s first love, Sybl Vain. Finally, drag legend Flawless Sabrina enacts the visceral Dead Dorian in the finale after the eponymous portrait’s power dissolves.