EROS BDAY MUSH.mov

A quartet of crack addicts in Miami sit around, while outside, the biggest hurricane of the century is about to hit. The Pixelvision camera roams restlessly through the apartment, focusing nervously on the tiniest details, but never staying in any one spot for very long. Meanwhile, the addicts engage in desultory conversation, or make phone calls, or tell stories about their past experiences.

Caldwell's pulp storytelling, proto-feminist stance and unabashed social dramatization of his characters are a distinct vision of the condition of women -- specifically working class women. His broadly drawn themes of small town hypocrisy and restrictive moral values contextualize the titular characters' struggle for sexual expression, stability and independence. Certain Women is a disconcerting parable that pays tribute to but also defies the 50s period style of Caldwell, opting for contemporary small town situations and cinematic style. This cautionary tale of four heroic yet ordinary women is fashioned out of the past but relies on observations of the present historical moment and its political reality.

Thanksgiving in California is the setting in which the viewer experiences "the depression inherent to festive occasions. There were many things bothering me at this time, or maybe it was one thing that broke into many pieces.

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, exploring mechanisms of power and submission.

A music-filled tour of Christmas good cheer overtakes this gastronomically oriented excursion through the winter season of discontent and yuletime yearnings craving ignition.

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and "scary" music suggests that the girls' toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire consequences.

Peggy Ahwesh re-edits and optically prints a Super 8 stag loop, rarifying the degraded images into an abstract stained-glass mosaic. From a clumsy and heavy-handed pornographic film of the seventies that bad storage conditions have deteriorated over time, Peggy Ahwesh uses the alterations and the mold of the film to emphasize the sensuality of the scenes. It produces a newborn, beautiful film, powerful, erotic, and disarming at a time.

Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth.

Buddy, a young gay man leaves his small-town home in rural Upstate New York to make a new life in New York City.

It begins with footage from a stylish old potboiler about an isolated convent, whose tale of passions leashed and unleashed provides the leitmotif for a young lesbian who watches it and the lonely nun she pursues and seduces. As the two women's lives come closer to joining, voiceovers from the biography of a 16th century lesbian nun and the reminiscences of a woman's closeted romances at a Catholic school flesh out the theme.

Made in collaboration with Keith Sanborn, The Deadman is based on a story by Bataille, charting "the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to the house to die — a combination of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor." — Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader.

With Heaven's Gate, Ahwesh employs a strategy similar to that used in 73 Suspect Words: against a blank screen, a metronomic procession of single words unfolds, gradually building into a cool, minimal portrait of the apocalyptic paranoia that runs through the American social body. While 73 Suspect Words appropriated text from the writings of Theodore Kaczynski, aka the "Unabomber," Heaven's Gate takes up words from the Web site of the cult organization of that name, whose beliefs in extraterrestrial contact led to their 1997 mass suicide.

A mockumentary following the troubled production of Clockmen: The Musical, focusing on a cosplayer-turned-actress who reacts to the stress of the production in a rather unusual way.

Peggy Ahwesh, H.D., 2005, still from video with sound, 1 min. 30 sec.

"A four-channel video installation featuring original footage shot primarily from a bird’s eye view of the Kansas town known as the geographical center of the US as a way to reflect upon what the artist considers “a metonymy for the country as a whole”. Double-projection imagery of the aerial shots of this landscape — at times forming abstract and stereoscope-like compositions — become close-ups on grotesque monuments and sculptures as the camera descends to ground level. Additionally, two iPads both contained within glass domes each play a video of one of two houses that sit directly opposite each other in a residential Topeka neighborhood. One is the headquarters of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church with its anti-LGBTQ signs and other hate-filled rhetoric; the second is the “Equality House”, which was formed later as a direct response, with its rainbow colors and messages of peace and acceptance." - Microscope Gallery