Friday, May 8, 2009 @ 7:30 PM
Featured Artist
Never Merely Pretty: Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh
Presented by PDX Fest and Cinema Project
Artist-in-attendance
PDX Fest and Cinema Project welcome filmmaker and video artist Peggy Ahwesh for an evening of selections from her extensive body of work. Currently a professor at Bard College in film and electronic arts, Ahwesh, who once worked under George Romero and was taught by Tony Conrad, has been making films for 35 years, often collaborating with friends and colleagues. Starting out under the influence of the Pennsylvania punk scene with hand-held Super-8s constantly running, her approach to her subjects is part home movie, part documentary, and part experimental ethnography—a mix of textures that results in something entirely different and something “gloriously messy.”
As part of a generation of artists whose work grew out of an anti-art sensibility, Ahwesh’s work can seem split between a fascination with the people around her and more academic leanings. Within this dialectical approach, she stages at one end re-readings (both literally and figuratively) of psychoanalytic texts and on the other a certain curiosity about performance—the slow or erratic jouissance of the subject that unfolds before the camera. In Martina’s Playhouse and The Scary Movie, which both star the daughter of a friend, she addresses issues of female sexuality and desire, but from a vantage point “outside of male fantasy.” On She Puppet, which re-appropriates a session of the videogame Tomb Raider, Ahwesh says that it’s about “female identity…a riff off one videogame with this virtual superstar from the popular imagination.” This program seeks to display Ahwesh’s special attention to the various visual media she employs—from 16mm and Super 8, to digital video and computer animation—as it acts as another character that alters the material of the visual field. Also known for her sound and music collaborations, pieces like Beirut Outtakes and The Color of Love are as entrancing and textured in their imagery as they are in their audio.
Ahwesh’s is messy work…deeply invested in the luxurious plenitude of the visual field. The films look great and yet are never merely pretty; they frustrate aestheticising, formalist tastes. Likewise, although the films often cite theoretical texts, they are never merely theoretical. They inhabit a strange stretch of territory in the world of experimental film and video, never exhibiting the formal shape of, say, a Hollis Frampton or the precise political clarity of a Su Friedrich. Ahwesh’s practice is a porous one, grounded on a radical technique of pastiche and aimed at unsettling categories and hierarchies.
---John David Rhodes, Senses of Cinema
The Scary Movie
Peggy Ahwesh
9min/16mm/1993
The Color of Love
Peggy Ahwesh
10min/16mm/1994
Beirut Outtakes
Peggy Ahwesh
8min/DV/2007
Martina’s Playhouse
Peggy Ahwesh
20min/S8/1989
Pittsburgh Trilogy Pt.2
Peggy Ahwesh
17min/S8/1983
She Puppet
Peggy Ahwesh
17min/DV/2001
The Third Body
Peggy Ahwesh
9min/DV/2007
