Video History Project

People

Peggy Ahwesh

Peggy Ahwesh creates a kind of renegade arte povera ethnography of the everyday, approaching culturally complex issues and individuals with disarming simplicity and intelligence, and with risk-taking vulnerability, humor and abandon. Ahwesh has been behind the camera since the early '80s, at that time working out of the thrift store glamour of industrial Pittsburgh--the city that delivered George Romero, Andy Warhol and Peggy Ahwesh! Most often drawn to the immediate and the personal, Ahwesh's films combine hanging out and acting out with serendipitous occurrences and telling details.

Her characters are outspoken and the films talk back to the muffling zeitgeist. Ahwesh's films are unparalleled documents and beautifully distilled essays about ruptures in human continuities. In the contrasts posed between childhood, adolescence and adulthood, we experience the beauty and pain, the consequence of knowledge and the submersion into the social. Ahwesh's films penetrate to the heart of American ritual in an unprecedented way.

Some of the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne were able to reach into the transfiguring moments when an ossified Puritanism spilled over into shocking carnival-- exposing the hidden order of things and the true nature of its celebrants. Ahwesh comes at similar concerns from a unique perspective, unearthing the subterranean roots of sandbox antics, doll playing, bedroom dalliance and tantrums, tourist attractions, social gatherings and the S/M rodeo of love relationships. Ahwesh's films act as semi-guided tours that break all the rules of protocol--charting the off handed moments of impact--both the civilizing and transgressive elements that contribute to our social construction and private sense of self.

The films identify and unglue some of our notions of romance, sexuality, violence, language. The bind that they leave us in is the bind of our own bodies, our inherited histories, our status as a partially occupied territory within the prevailing culture. These films celebrate also a truancy from that culture, a blistering that leads to disruption and self definition." --- Mark McElhatten see http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/ahwesh.html

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"Peggy Ahwesh." Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/peggy-ahwesh.

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Summary

Peggy Ahwesh has worked behind the camera since the early '80s from Pittsburgh and makes films that combine hanging out and acting out with serendipitous occurrences and telling details; her characters are outspoken and the films respond to the muffling zeitgeist. Her work is described as documents and distilled essays about ruptures between childhood, adolescence and adulthood that penetrate American ritual and unearth subterranean roots of sandbox antics, doll playing, bedroom dalliance, tourist attractions, social gatherings and S/M love relationships. Quotation attributed to Mark McElhatten with source http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/ahwesh.html.

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Last modified 17 June 2011

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