NYAB Event - Peggy Ahwesh and Jennifer Montgomery “Two Serious Ladies”

Peggy Ahwesh and Jennifer Montgomery “Two Serious Ladies”

Murray Guy

This event has ended.

Over the years Peggy Ahwesh and Jennifer Montgomery’s individual practices have concerned similar inquiries into feminism, experimental filmmaking, genre, and cultural identity. Analogous to the two protagonists in Jane Bowles’ 1943 novel Two Serious Ladies, who each go off on personal odysseys and come back to philosophize about their experiences, Ahwesh and Montgomery inspire and reflect one another. This exhibition presents films that span a relationship of nearly 30 years in which the artists continue to return to each other in order to witness, contribute to, and perform in each other’s work.

The daily gallery program will include a continuous play of the following six films. A weekly evening screening will take place with additional films by Peggy Ahwesh, Jennifer Montgomery, as well as Moyra Davey, Jason Simon, Tara Nelson, Esfir Shub, and others.

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Jennifer Montgomery, Transitional Objects, 2000, 19 minutes
“Begun as a consideration of the upgrading from manual to digital film editing techniques, Transitional Objects explores the anxiety and loss inevitable in such a transition while also suggesting the consequences of other life transitions. The video takes its title from D.W. Winnicott’s theory of children’s use of transitional objects to negotiate the gaps between internal reality and the shared reality of people and things. Remarkably layered, Transitional Objects weaves together considerations of splicing, Winnicott, sewing, motherhood, new technology and loss of mastery.” –Carl Bogner, Union Theater, Milwaukee, WI

Peggy Ahwesh, The Ape of Nature, 2010, 24 minutes
Ape of Nature 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 divine. In the Ape of Nature, inspired by Herzog’s Heart of Glass, the performers evoke a murky past and foreshadow a dystopic future.

Peggy Ahwesh, Collections, 2012, 6 minutes
A video about the spiritual currency of objects, the desire to hang on to the inexplicable… “something profoundly related to subjectivity: for while the object is a resistant material body, it is also, simultaneously, a mental realm over which I hold sway, a thing whose meaning is governed by myself alone.” A rapid tour through the magic system of the collection, momentarily diverting attention from our throwaway society.

Peggy Ahwesh, Bethlehem, 2009, 8 minutes
“Working through my archive of accumulated video footage, I pretended it was found footage from anonymous sources, editing memories like a string of pearls. 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 a dedication to my father as I wound my way through personal miscellany with distance and a broader aim.” –Peggy Ahwesh

Jennifer Montgomery, One Species Removed, 2013, 38 minutes
This video is about animal empathy (anthropomorphism) and our struggles with mortality. The title reflects a pun, with two supporting sources. The first, that we often transfer our most profound emotions onto other animals, i.e., “one species removed.” The second, the crackpot but very moving theories of Rudolf Steiner. He believed that animals have a group soul, used interchangeably with the term “species.” When one animal dies, the group replaces that part of itself. By contrast, each human being is an individual species/soul, so that when we die, a whole species is rendered extinct.

Peggy Ahwesh, Martina’s Playhouse, 1989, 20 minutes
“In Martina’s Playhouse everything is up for grabs. The little girl of the title oscillates from narrator to reader to performer and from the role of baby to that of mother. While the roles she adopts may be learned, they are not set, and she moves easily between them. Similarly, in filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh’s playhouse of encounters with friends, objects aren’t merely objects but shift between layers of meaning. Men are conspicuously absent, a ‘lack’ reversing the Lacanian/Freudian constructions of women, as Ahwesh plays with other possibilities.”—Kathy Geritz, program notes (Berkeley: Pacific Film Archive, 1990)