Silver Lake performance-art siren Kari French's obsession with Mattel's popular, anatomically incorrect beauty queen is well-known. Her house even serves as a veritable shrine to all things Barbie. With 300 dolls from different eras on display throughout her Barbie-and-art-packed villa, it draws reporters and visitors from as far away as France and Germany. Indeed, she often poses for photographers in one of her many guises -- "The Cannibal Stripper," "Kari Kaos," etc. -- amidst the baroque, Barbie-laden interior of her pop-art palace.

But if you thought French's idee fixe had lost its power to shock, titillate and amuse, think again. The brazen, hazel-eyed sexpot, famous for her incarnation as "The Pussy Print-Cess" -- a deranged ballerina who makes brightly colored tempera prints of her cooch to the tune of Clair de Lune -- is back with a new show at the Iota Gallery titled Rejecting Barbie and Other Happy Mindfucks, which has its grand opening this Friday from 9 p.m. till whenever. The gala event should have all the booze, music, and decadence one has come to expect from French's "everyone knows, anything goes" happenings. The exhibit went up a week or two ago to coincide with French's birthday, but the party this Friday is the real deal.

French's exhibit slices and dices Barbie with all the happy glee of a serial killer on speed. Of the 19 sculptures on the walls, there's "Roadkill Barbie," a flattened doll affixed to a patch of tire tread; "Barbie Clit," a large vagina with Barbie's smiling face as the ever-popular almond of love; "Anal Bead Barbie," with several decapitated Barbie heads in the form of the outré sex toy; "Bowling with Barbie," an interactive piece wherein the player uses a Barbie with a bowling-ball head to knock over a triangle of Barbie pins; and, perhaps the most cruel of the bunch, "50th Anniversary Hiroshima Barbie," with Barbie in a kimono left open to reveal the scarring caused by the atomic blast.

It's all par for the course for the thirtysomething San Jose-born ex-stripper who says she's moving away from the performance-based art that has garnered her so much attention and spending more time manufacturing art objects. "The reason I'm phasing out of performing is the audience," she says, sitting on the floor of the Goth TV room of her dimly lit pad. "Every year things get a little more acceptable. It's not such a big deal anymore. Ironically, though, it's more sleazy. There's probably not a club in town where you don't have to work as a lap dancer. People just want more for their money. What I do is pretty sexual, but it's kind of lighter than being a sex worker. I don't really want to be lumped into that category."

Of course, The Pussy Printcess still makes an occasional appearance. And French recently wowed the crowd at last month's Velvet Hammer Juxtapoz soiree at the Key Club where she did her Salome impersonation under the guise of "Carlotta Blue." But other than a rare gig here and there, she claims to be retired. Apparently it's "Barbie's Army" all the way for French.

Strangely, French didn't play with Barbies much as a kid. "When I was 19, my mom gave me two, and those became some of my earliest pieces," she says. "It's always been a love/hate relationship. The first thing I did was make them into punk rockers.

"I loved the mod Barbie. Those fashions influenced me a lot. But when I got reintroduced to them in the mid-'80s, I was really disgusted by what they looked like -- they started making her so creepy." French and her pals used to hang out drinking and playing with their Barbies, inventing bizarre scenarios for them. Her Barbie monomania evolved from there. "I'd been doing them for quite a while before it dawned on me," says French, "Oooh, I guess I am an artist!"