Peggy Ahwesh

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

It begins with footage from a stylish old potboiler about an isolated convent, whose tale of passions leashed and unleashed provides the leitmotif for a young lesbian who watches it and the lonely nun she pursues and seduces. As the two women's lives come closer to joining, voiceovers from the biography of a 16th century lesbian nun and the reminiscences of a woman's closeted romances at a Catholic school flesh out the theme.

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.

Futuristic story of Carlos and Ben who fall in love in high school despite the racism and and homophobia. When Fundamentalist forces threaten to take over the U.S. the pair join forces with an underground resistance movement.

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.

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

This lunar eclipse event of November 2003 is observed, documented, and translated by eye and hand via the light-sensitive medium of Kodachrome film. In the 4th c BCE Aristotle founded The Lyceum, a school for the study of all natural phenomena pursued without the aid of mathematics, which was considered too perfect for application on this imperfect terrestrial sphere. This film then, in the spirit of...

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.

From Romance to Ritual invokes and inverts the title of the 1920 book by Jessie L. Weston, as it, like the book, draws connections between pagan history and ritual and mythology.

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.

Buddy, a young gay man leaves his small-town home in rural Upstate New York to make a new life in New York City.

Peggy Ahwesh, H.D., 2005, still from video with sound, 1 min. 30 sec.

Through original imagery and footage of airplane flights captured within a mid-2000s 3D flight simulation computer game, "The Wayfinders" addresses notions of power, control, lost histories, displacement, and freedom, especially in times of oppression and war. [Overview courtesy of Microscope Gallery]

It's a portrait of my friend Renate, who was born in Berlin and spent her early childhood playing in the rubble after WW2. She tells stories and recites entries from her diary in both English and German, evoking history, trauma and lost loves. Shot in long verite-like takes, in Super 8 sound, with several color hand processed scenes.

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.

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.

A quartet of crack addicts in Miami sit around, while outside, the biggest hurricane of the century is about to hit. The Pixelvision camera roams restlessly through the apartment, focusing nervously on the tiniest details, but never staying in any one spot for very long. Meanwhile, the addicts engage in desultory conversation, or make phone calls, or tell stories about their past experiences.

In this new collaborative work, the legacy of renegade scientist and social thinker Wilhelm Reich gets the musical treatment it has long deserved, thanks to filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Jacqueline Goss, and an ensemble of co-conspirators including composer Zach Layton and performers Cecilia Aldarondo, Laith Ayogu, Lana Lin, Jennifer Montgomery, and Marianne Shaneen, among many others. A student and protégé of Freud’s, and one of the most radical figures in the history of psychotherapy, Reich famously claimed to have discovered orgone, a form of life energy pervading the universe. Shot in his home and laboratory in Rangeley, Maine, OR119 transmutes Reich’s writings into song, while also conjuring into existence a series of impossible encounters between Reich and a selection of contemporary feminist writers. A theoretical musical that’s as playful and liberating as it is formally challenging and intellectually provocative, OR119 is suffused with its own unique artistic life force.

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.

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)