| I came of age as an artist and filmmaker with the punk movement in the late 70s, making Super 8 films of my friends and family and various local celebrities in Pittsburgh, PA. The countercultural impulses and progressive energies of that era continue to inform my work and method. Horror films, low-budget exploitation films, and home movies, along with the teachings of feminism and the desire to represent stories of women’s lives, provide me with inspiration. Martina’s Playhouse (1989) is a film that offers a deceptively casual and ultimately complex investigation of feminine identity. The camera is focused on Martina, age 3, with scenes of Martina, her mother, and an adult female friend, comparing and contrasting their behavior, desire, and performance. |  |
Peggy Ahwesh
I came of age as an artist and filmmaker with the punk movement in the late 70s, making Super 8 films of my friends and family and various local celebrities in Pittsburgh, PA. The countercultural impulses and progressive energies of that era continue to inform my work and method. Horror films, low-budget exploitation films, and home movies, along with the teachings of feminism and the desire to represent stories of women’s lives, provide me with inspiration.
Martina’s Playhouse (1989) is a film that offers a deceptively casual and ultimately complex investigation of feminine identity. The camera is focused on Martina, age 3, with scenes of Martina, her mother, and an adult female friend, comparing and contrasting their behavior, desire, and performance. The film documents the child and adults’ everyday routine, but goes on to situate them within a psychoanalytic framework. Martina reads and mis-reads French psychoanalytic theory to her own advantage. The title refers to the television show Pee Wee’s Playhouse, but here the “playhouse,” and again in The Scary Movie (1993), depicts the construction of identity that is at work in the interplay between child and adult, person and love object, filmmaker and subject.
The imaginative and excessive life of women within a social or technological framework is often the content of my films. She Puppet (2001) reworks footage sampled from the Tomb Raider video game. The virtual heroine moves through the game world, shooting and dying and springing back to life. Death is repeatable, thus ecstatic. I appropriated the game to give Lara Croft an uncanny existence, reflecting on women’s position at the end of the 20th century. As she drifts though the canyons and underwater passages of the game, we muse on her virtual identity as past and future worlds collide.
The Ape of Nature (2009) takes its title from the 15th-century notion that all the arts, including alchemy, are our attempts to attain the perfection of nature. Characters and situations were borrowed from a Herzog film about the secret craft of glassmaking and the dream state of hypnosis. Using Freudian techniques, dream analysis, role playing, slips of the tongue, the installation forms a theater of expression about past loss and future uncertainty as the players speak from their unconsciousness about imaginary lives they perhaps lived. The companion video Bethlehem (2009) uses associative editing of footage from my archive of out-takes and discards, forming a memory trace of childhood and family.
The cluttered sets and fragmented stories in much of my work evince a low-end baroque sensibility that I like to associate with the ornate performance films of Jack Smith. Charting the circuits and interruptions of desire, the exuberant ceaseless flow of being, interrogating how we can become more alive, more fully human is my driving force.
