Peggy Ahwesh

Fill Thy Crack with Whiteness

George Kuchar

Peggy Ahwesh, Dave Alvin

A music-filled tour of Christmas good cheer overtakes this gastronomically oriented excursion through the winter season of discontent and yuletime yearnings craving ignition.

Age 12: Love with a Little L

Jennifer Montgomery

Nina Fonoroff, Robin Guarino

This film is depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire, transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission.

Strange Weather

Peggy Ahwesh, Margie Strosser

Cheryl Dunye, Deirdre Lewis

A quartet of crack addicts, absorbed by their life of pure sensation, are holed up inside while the world outside is about to explode.

Nocturne

Peggy Ahwesh

Bradley Eros, Anne Kugler

Nocturne is a psychological horror film built on the conflicts of a woman tortured by the ambiguity between reality and illusion, dream and desire. The woman has perhaps murdered her lover and is living in an unstable world when he returns to her at night, in her dreams and into her arms, as witness to the subversive violence of nature, corporeality and desire. (PA)

The Color of Love

Peggy Ahwesh

Peggy Ahwesh re-edits and optically prints a Super 8 stag loop, rarifying the degraded images into an abstract stained-glass mosaic.From a clumsy and heavy handed pornographic film of the seventies that bad storage conditions have deteriorated over time, Peggy Ahwesh uses the alterations and the mold of the film to emphasize the sensuality of the scenes. It produces a newborn beautiful film , powerful, erotic and disarming at a time.

She Puppet

Peggy Ahwesh

Lara Croft, the virtual girl-doll of the late 20th century, is recast as a triad of her personas: the alien, the orphan, and the clone in this work based on appropriated footage from the game Tomb Raider.

Martina's Playhouse

Peggy Ahwesh

Diana Torr, Martina Meijer Torr

Martina plays on her own and with her mother, Jennifer talks, stock footage of flowers is talked over.

The Scary Movie

Peggy Ahwesh

Martina Meijer Torr, Sonja Mereu

Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and "scary" music suggests that the girls' toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire consequences.

The Making of a Superhero Musical

Reuben Baron

James Aaronson, Peggy Ahwesh

A mockumentary following the troubled production of Clockmen: The Musical, focusing on a cosplayer-turned-actress who reacts to the stress of the production in a rather unusual way.

Rainy Season

George Kuchar

Peggy Ahwesh, Claire Bain

Thanksgiving in California is the setting in which the viewer experiences "the depression inherent to festive occasions. There were many things bothering me at this time, or maybe it was one thing that broke into many pieces.

The Deadman

Peggy Ahwesh, Keith Sanborn

Jennifer Montgomery, Scott Shat

Made in collaboration with Keith Sanborn, The Deadman is based on a story by Bataille, charting "the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to the house to die — a combination of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor." — Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader.

Heaven's Gate

Peggy Ahwesh

With Heaven's Gate, Ahwesh employs a strategy similar to that used in 73 Suspect Words: against a blank screen, a metronomic procession of single words unfolds, gradually building into a cool, minimal portrait of the apocalyptic paranoia that runs through the American social body. While 73 Suspect Words appropriated text from the writings of Theodore Kaczynski, aka the "Unabomber," Heaven's Gate takes up words from the Web site of the cult organization of that name, whose beliefs in extraterrestrial contact led to their 1997 mass suicide.

73 Suspect Words

Peggy Ahwesh

73 Suspect Words is a deceptively simple and ultimately chilling meditation on the power of text. Ahwesh succinctly delves into one person's obsessive irrationality, and his expressions of fear and anger. Based on a spell-check of the Unabomber's manifesto, the work evokes the violence underlying the key words presented.

The Star Eaters

Peggy Ahwesh

Jackie Smith, Alex Auder

A short and inconclusive treatise on women and gambling. The allure of risk taking, the contradictions of excessive behavior and a penchant for failure combine in this fairytale set in the abandoned decay which was onced a glamorous Atlantic City. A sentimental education at the seashore off-season.

Alluvium

Peggy Ahwesh

"A visual essay drawn from my experience of being embedded for some time in a place, one that is both beautiful and ancient but also is an abysmal war zone -- the occupied territory of Palestine. The piece quotes Jalal Toufic, Jean Genet and H.P. Lovecraft, drawing poetic lines between the familiar tropes of the revenant, the undead and the disembodied, with the lives of the Palestinians. Refugees, between worlds, yearning for their original soil, in limbo, lost in the labyrinth..." - Peggy Ahwesh

Kansas Atlas

Peggy Ahwesh

"A four-channel video installation featuring original footage shot primarily from a bird’s eye view of the Kansas town known as the geographical center of the US as a way to reflect upon what the artist considers “a metonymy for the country as a whole”. Double-projection imagery of the aerial shots of this landscape — at times forming abstract and stereoscope-like compositions — become close-ups on grotesque monuments and sculptures as the camera descends to ground level. Additionally, two iPads both contained within glass domes each play a video of one of two houses that sit directly opposite each other in a residential Topeka neighborhood. One is the headquarters of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church with its anti-LGBTQ signs and other hate-filled rhetoric; the second is the “Equality House”, which was formed later as a direct response, with its rainbow colors and messages of peace and acceptance." - Microscope Gallery