Writes Ahwesh: "Working through my archive of accumulated video footage, I pretended it was found footage from anonymous sources. What began as a tribute to Bruce Conner of the period of Valse Triste and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, with their deliberate pace and bittersweet memory of home, ended as...
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...
73 Suspect Words is a deceptively simple and ultimately chilling meditation on the power of text. Ahwesh succinctly delves into one person's obsessive irrationality, and his expressions of fear and anger. Based on a spell-check of the Unabomber's manifesto, the work evokes the violence underlying...
A re-staging of Reich’s question, “Am I a Spaceman?”, at a cloudbuster near his laboratory in Rangeley, Maine. 2) A re-staging of the spaceman’s warning speech to earthlings in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Here the spaceship is replaced by WR’s tomb. - AFA
This film is depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire, transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes,...
Lara Croft, the virtual girl-doll of the late 20th century, is recast as a triad of her personas: the alien, the orphan, and the clone in this work based on appropriated footage from the game Tomb Raider.
"This is footage of the famous fountain at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai that I shot in April, 2010 when I was there for the art fair. The song is Amvaj (Waves) by Bijan Mortazavi."
A film about the socialization process and repression. My footage of family and friends intercut with Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Pasolini’s Pig Sty. Trying to filter the mud of consciousness in the brain of the child, the doomsday prophet and the suburban art collector to extract the...
Here Ahwesh's heterogeneous textual approach comes to the fore, as she juxtaposes narrative, faux documentary, comedic and "serious" footage, and merges film, video, and Pixelvision. Suggestions and meanings accumulate: austere, theoretical text is interrupted by shots of women relating bawdy...
Utilizing heat sensing imaging technology, scenes of everyday incidents of the city are transformed into glimpses of our world through an alien lens. Two insertions of on-screen text betray Ahwesh's ominous implications. The first is a meditation on Rudyard Kipling's oft-quoted "Truth is the first...
Investigates memory and the uncanny through the experience of hypnotized subjects who communicate via a glacial and slow storytelling informed by suggestion and the working of the unconscious. Art is the ape of nature—the imitation, the mirror, the follies of human invention that strive for the...
My cat Claude was recovering from a car accident that nearly killed him and I thought it would be interesting to have his aura read. I wanted to see how he was feeling psychically and test for trauma or unhappiness. Fortunately, the cat seemed to be fine and pretty healthy.
The summer of 2020 I spent most nights outdoors alone transfixed by the theater of the stars and the dance of the fireflies. My sense of time expanded and slowed but the time-lapse camera condenses and speeds up the experience, in seeming contradiction. I waved my arms to trip the neighbors’...
