Poses: Cascading Figures
A limited edition produced on the occasion of Peggy Ahwesh’s survey exhibition Vision Machines at Spike Island (25 September 2021 to 16 January 2022).
In the early 2010s, Ahwesh began making works from a database she found on YouTube made by a Taiwanese Company that specialises in lo-res animated news. Struck by how “something so vital as a news item is reduced to CGI animation” these animated scenes have since appeared in her films Lessons of War (2014); Smart Phone (2014); Verily! The Blackest Sea, The Falling Sky (2017) and Re: the Operation (2019), all of which feature in Ahwesh’s 2021 exhibition at Spike Island.
This limited edition print removes some of the figures from these animated news scenes, further abstracting them from their original potent news sources and pausing them in scenes of peril, distress and trauma.
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Peggy Ahwesh
Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. Born in 1954 in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, she received her B.F.A. at Antioch College, Ohio. Retrospective exhibitions include: Girls Beware!, Whitney Museum of American Art (1997); 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; others. Screenings: Whitney Biennial (1991, 1995, 2002); New York Film Festival (1998, 2007); Flaherty Film Seminar (2003); Pompidou Center (2002, 2004); Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2017). Festivals include: Berlin; London; Cairo; Toronto; Rotterdam; and Creteil, France. Certain Women (codirected with Bobby Abate) was an official selection at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the opening night film at the New York Underground Film Festival (2004). Other films include Martina’s Playhouse, The Deadman (codirected with Keith Sanborn), Strange Weather, and Nocturne, all in Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. She has received grants from Jerome and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, Alpert Award in the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Art Matters. She teaches Film and Electronic Art at Bard College, New York.