Peggy Ahwesh2000

While the weight of ordinary activities and the style of the "home movie" fashion Ahwesh's earlier Super 8mm films, more eccentric manifestations, in the form of perversion, abjection, the subcultural and supernatural, are emphasized in the recent work. Mixing styles, formats, low-end and obsolete technologies, and foregrounding the process of inquiry, Ahwesh uses various cameras not to get a "look," but to express and represent a specific way of knowing the world. Her strong, defiant women characters, each in some way a doppelganger, play out their roles in an ongoing survey of the feminine. Apt to damage, even mutilate the film surface with splotches, creases, and flecks, Ahwesh's strategy stands in stark contrast to the sensitivity with which she commits people to film. Edgy and often rude, this work keeps American avant-garde film on boil.

"I return again and again to filmmaking because of the resistance that image and sound material have to being contained by a simple logic or an assignment of meaning. Spilling over in excess, the subversive power, beauty and emotional charge of the material always surprises me. When these fluid conditions are activated and the performers are really on, my job is to massage a form out of what has been conjured up. My kind of storytelling, multi-centered and multi-layered, with the drama of all the in-between moments, uses a kind of non-technique as technique and non-narrative's narrative."