• 6-7pm: Open Studios with Project Space Resident Sydney Mieko King

• 7-9pm: Screening and Book talk with Peggy Ahwesh and Curator Tara Merenda Nelson

• In-Person (artist in attendance)

• $10 suggested/free for members [tickets]

• Purchase Sourcebooks by Peggy Ahwesh here

Join us as we celebrate our latest VSW Press/Film Art Book publication, Sourcebooks by Peggy Ahwesh. This unique artist book is a comprehensive collection of articles, letters, images, notations and drawings collected throughout the production of five of Ahwesh’s most iconic films: Martina’s Playhouse (1989), The Deadman (1990), She Puppet (2001), Ape of Nature (2009), and OR119 (2022). This event will include a screening of films featured in the book, and a discussion between Ahwesh and VSW curator Tara Merenda Nelson. Artist in person. Download program PDF here.

Program:

The Third Body
2007, 8:40 min, color, sound

An appropriated film, portraying the arrival of Adam and Eve to an exotic Eden, is intercut with appropriated videos of virtual reality demonstrations, among them a human hand shadowed by a computer-generated rendering, medical robots conducting a virtual surgery, and people dressed in bulky headgear navigating virtual spaces. As the title suggests, cyberspace adds to the Genesis legend a third possibility, a virtual existence that challenges natural and social definitions of gender and morality.

Ahwesh writes, “The tropes of the garden, the originary moment of self knowledge and gendered awareness of the body (what is traditionally called sin) is mimicked in the early experiments with virtual reality. The metaphors used in our cutting edge future are restagings of our cultural memory of the garden. Wonderment regarding the self in space, boundaries of the body at the edge of consciousness and the inside and outside skin of perceptual knowledge.”

Music: Morton Feldman.

She Puppet
2001, 15 min, color, sound

Re-editing footage collected from months of playing Tomb Raider, Ahwesh transforms the video game into a reflection on identity and mortality. Trading the rules of gaming for art making, she brings Tomb Raider’s cinematic aesthetics to the foreground, and shirks the pre-programmed “mission” of its heroine, Lara Croft. Ahwesh acknowledges the intimate relationship between this fictional character and her player. Moving beyond her implicit feminist critique of the problematic female identity, she enlarges the dilemma of Croft’s entrapment to that of the individual in an increasingly artificial world.

Voiceovers: Yuko Aramaki, Samuael Topiary, Eva Waniek. Quotes from “The Book of Disquiet,” by Fernando Pessoa, “The Female Man,” by Joanna Russ, and Sun Ra. Thanks: Jon Di Benedetto, Su Friedrich, Keith Sanborn, Samuael Topiary, Karim Ghawagi, The White Box Gallery, Stella’s Tombraider site. Funding: New York State Council on the Arts.

Martina’s Playhouse
1989, 19:48 min, color, sound, Super 8mm film on video

The artist writes that this work, “a response to Pee Wee’s Playhouse, focuses on the girl child, grappling with the fluidity of gender roles as she role-plays with her toys.”

With: Jennifer Montgomery, Diane Torr, Martina Torr

The Fallen
2017, revised 2024,  5:30 video

A work of appropriation, with images taken from News Direct, a subsidiary of Next Animation Studio, Taiwan. The audio track is a remix of Blue Veils and Golden Sands (1995) incidental music for the BBC composed by Delia Derbyshire and audio samples from freesound.org.

Quote by Don DeLillo.

The VSW Salon is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts.