Women Make Waves International Film Festival

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    Martina's Playhouse

    Peggy Ahwesh 1989 USA color 20min DCP
    A response to Pee Wee's Playhouse, the film focuses on the girl child Martina──daughter of performance artist and drag king Diane TORR, grappling with the fluidity of gender roles as she role-plays with her toys. As Kathy GERIZ has written, “Men are conspicuously absent, a ‘lack’ reversing the Lacanian/Freudian constructions of women, as AHWESH plays with other possibilities.”

    Director

    Peggy Ahwesh

    Over the course of her career, Peggy AHWESH has produced one of the most heterogeneous bodies of work in the field of experimental film and video. A true bricoleur, her tools include narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance and scripted dialogue, synch-sound film, found footage, digital animation, and crude Pixelvision video. With playfulness and humor, she investigates cultural and gender identities, feminism, the role of the subject, language, and representation. Peggy AHWESH came of age in the 1970’s with feminist politics and the experimental film underground. Her formative years were spent in Pittsburgh where she worked for horror director George ROMERO and as a film programmer at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Inc. Originally she worked in the Super 8mm film format and now works in film, video, and digital media. AHWESH’s art practice insists on political and social topicality and theoretical rigor, while incorporating playfulness, humor and the absurd in an open embrace of the inexplicable. Retrospective exhibitions include: Girls Beware!, Whitney Museum of American Art; Filmmuseum, Brussels; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Peggy’s Playhouse, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, among others.

    Peggy Ahwesh

    1983 The Pittsburgh Trilogy
    1985 From Romance to Ritual
    1985-1995 The Fragments Project
    1987 Doppelganger
    1989 Martina's Playhouse
    1989 The Deadman
    1993 Strange Weather
    1993 The Scary Movie
    1994 The Color of Love
    1997 The Vision Machine
    1998 Nocturne
    2001 She Puppet
    2003 The Star Eaters
    2004 Certain Women
    2007 The Third Body
    2007 Warm Objects
    2016 The Blackest Sea
    2017 The Falling Sky
    2019 Kansas Atlas
    2021 Curve the Night Sky
    2023 OR119

    Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)

    jfbuchanan@eai.org

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