The Star Eaters, 2000 production still [Enlarge in New Window]

Peggy Ahwesh: The Star Eaters

After more than 20 years as a video artist, Peggy Ahwesh can rattle off with ease the prevalent themes in her work - women and sexual expression, small group interactions, the culture of the tribe, psychoanalytic looks at girls coming of age, and melodrama. But she knows it's not that easy for others.

"I do a little narrative, a little documentary, a little theory, a little portraiture, and a lot of sixties underground-looking work. It's hard to wrap your mind around it," she says. "Over the years, I wasn't one of those people who got a lot of grants. My work was always perceived as kind of scandalous and not categorizable in a way that could make me fundable. I've gotten a lot of grants in the past several years. Now I have a large body of work, and I think people have been able to read it as a whole as a style of working."

One of the key elements to Ahwesh's videos since she emerged from the punk scene in Pittsburgh in the late 1970s is that she works on many projects at one time, in many different formats, and is able to maintain diversity among the projects. "It's inefficient," she says, "but I eventually get things done. I shoot stuff that interests me in the world, not knowing how I intend to put it together. Then the pieces evolve in editing -- that's where the meaning happens. I could have something that took me three days to shoot, and then I edit it for a year."

Star Eaters is one of those pieces. Ahwesh shot the 40-minute mini DV experimental video during 2000 and 2001 and is currently going through the editing process. As Ahwesh delves into the piece, she's finding that it's much like its subject - it's about risk-taking.

"It's narrative-like," she says of the portrait of a fifty-ish woman rumbling through seedy gambling halls and hotel rooms in Atlantic City. Most of the story is told in voiceover, not documentary but not quite fiction, with no conclusion or conventional narrative ending. There are sex scenes in dreary hotels, gambling scenes, and other existential moments. There's also a mixture of aesthetics. "A lot of stuff is overexposed or underexposed, [and] we used the slo-mo shutter," she says. "Arthur Jaffa, my cinematographer, is a total stylist, and he invented a lot of amazing jerky camera movements and melodious camera movements. He shifted the palette of the video for the shoot."

In the meantime, Ahwesh completed a shorter piece, She Puppet, which was selected for the 2002 Whitney Biennial. This project is a video interpretation of the Tomb Raider video game. Ahwesh, a self-described Luddite, created it by recording onto mini DV the images from her computer screen while she was playing the game, then editing the footage and applying voiceover from various feminist and philosophical works.

"I was interested in working with it in an almost flat replication kind of way, where I didn't really change the original material much." She adds that since the Biennial opened in March, she got an email from a young artist who saw the piece and, assuming Ahwesh was also young because of the subject matter, wanted to know if she had any other videos. "I thought that was cool," Ahwesh says. "That somebody could see that and think there's a new person--I'm new to them. That was some kind of triumph for me."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | History | New York | 2000