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Floria Sigismondi continued... 
Image: Artist Floria Sigismondi Imagining a not-too-distant future in which designer bodies are possible, Sigismondi has constructed a set of beings that just might inhabit such a future. Up pops a slide of what looks like a human-lizard hybrid. Meet AND-ie: a woman with four breasts (for extra pleasure) and decorative fins down her back. Sigismondi recalls building her in a Los Angeles hotel room, where the staff took fright. "The cleaning ladies called it the monster upstairs," she says, chuckling. Included in the show, too, is a woman who has horns built into the soles of her feet, to make her taller, and a tail, for better balance. These modified people are not meant to be taken literally. "It's meant to prompt your imagination," she says. "If you were a chameleon, you'd be able to change colour. A half-woman, half-kangaroo would be able to get around quicker." It's biotechnology gone out of control. All of this is a long way from the Ontario College of Art and Design, where Sigismondi enrolled to study painting and illustration in 1987. By her own description, though, it was the two photography classes she took in her final years that sparked her artistic vision. After leaving OCAD, Sigismondi worked as a fashion photographer and says her first big break came in 1990 when a Globe and Mail magazine hired her to do a fashion spread. She directed her first music video at the suggestion of Don Allan, the founder of Toronto's Revolver Films, and in 1996 Marilyn Manson came calling, having seen and liked Blue, a video she'd done for the Canadian heavy metal band Harem Scarem. That, she says, was her second big break. It turns out that film, with its combination of elements from other mediaÐmotion, sound, lighting, and wardrobeÐis the kind of art she feels she was meant to make. It's here that her artistic vision became clearest. "I find I can't work in one medium too long. I find it constraining," she says. On film, Sigismondi creates unusual, self-contained worlds populated by fascinating humanoid creatures. Elongated beings hold hands and float toward the ceiling. A lizard-man flicks his forked tongue at a Medusa woman. Arms, faces, hands, separate from their owners and float away. These are some of the arresting images Sigismondi has used in music videos for Marilyn Manson, Tricky, and Amon Tobin. They are nothing like most of the pap one sees on MuchMusic or MTVÐthis ain't Britney Spears pouting and gyrating on Mars. Think Brothers Quay, or, more popularly, Tim Burton. Lurid, gothic, ravishingly grotesque, Sigismondi's videos present glimpses into a dark subconscious. Where do these unsettling visions come from? Sigismondi cites everything from dreams to Italian opera to technology. She describes for me a recent dream that could double as the plot for an old Cronenberg movie. Discovering a moth in her apartment, she follows it until it disappears into a hole in the wall. She becomes convinced that behind the walls of her apartment are millions of the creatures, crawling, laying eggs, and spinning cocoons into a gooey living mass. "I'm trying to close the hole, but they're coming out," she explains. Traditionally, women are not expected to act out these kinds of thoughts. Films that explore the dark side of human natureÐhorror, disease, moth-infested apartmentsÐare usually made by men. Women make movies like The Piano or A League of Their Own. Sigismondi acknowledges the stereotype, but says it baffles her, especially in light of the things women, and their bodies, go through. "Just the act of giving birth is quite a violent thing," she says. "People often portray themselves a certain way, though, and maybe are afraid that exposing that side will make them less attractive." When it comes to artistic inspiration, Sigismondi cites the work of Hans Bellmer, a German-born surrealist best known in the 1930s for his life-size pubescent dolls and Francis Bacon. Her website 
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