RUBBER MIRROR, Michelle Carla Handel’s first solo exhibition at Five Car Garage, presents paintings and objects that work within the edges of body and thing, architecture and theater. Reflexive gestures and materiality hint at layered meanings, jogging something familiar or stirring up vague recollections — a word that’s on the tip of the tongue, a half-remembered dream upon waking, something out of the corner of your eye. Testing the limits of spatial and material perception with ceramic, rubber, textiles and photography, Handel’s soft and hard forms disrupt notions of the certain and nameable. Ceramic paintings push and pull with pattern and color, flattening out into painterly abstraction in some areas and wildly protruding a sculptural presence in others. Evocations, abbreviations and shortcuts close the distance between body and thing, bouncing between them in an infinite regression. Michelle Carla Handel, born in Las Vegas and raised in Texas, received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2011. Recently Handel was a recipient of the 2020 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. She has shown extensively in and around the Los Angeles area at galleries and museums such as the Torrance Art Museum, Wignall Museum, ACME., Royale Projects, WEEKEND, among others. Recent residencies include Anderson Ranch and Vermont Studio Center, both in 2018. Handel lives and works in Los Angeles.