INSIDE CIRCLE: New Works by Peggy Ahwesh

We are pleased to present INSIDE CIRCLE a solo exhibition by media artist Peggy Ahwesh. The inspiration for the exhibit is a series of personal voice mail messages left over a 10-year period by Ahwesh’s long-time friend and collaborator Natalka Voslakov, who died this December. For INSIDE CIRCLE Ahwesh incorporates elements of sound, anamorphic photographs, record players, and video to contemplate the nature and limits of friendship and continues her exploration of cultural identity and the role of the subject, recurrent themes in her body of work for more than 20 years.
 
For the installation, Ahwesh has transferred Voslakov’s voicemails, “a massive inventory of her diatribes and confessions, complaints and self deprecations”, which Voslakov considered an art project, on to records that play simultaneously. Operating with a related sense of rotation, repetition and distortion are a series of photographs inspired by the two friends’ shared rust-belt backgrounds. In these works, Ahwesh employs anamorphosis - a technique historically used to obscure objectionable content such as the erotic, scatological, occult, or religious – to create the images, but has omitted the mechanism needed to decode them.  Additional mixed media works as well as a new short video “Jericho” will also be on view.


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Peggy Ahwesh is a media artist who got her start in the 1970's with feminism, punk and amateur Super 8 filmmaking. Ahwesh says “These formats, points of view, political positions and life styles inspired by those areas of investigation remain relevant today and linger with a trace on everything I do.”
 
Ahwesh has exhibited worldwide including most recently at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Goethe House, NYC; The Tate Modern, London; The Virginia Museum of Art; Microscope Gallery, NYC; James Gallery, NYC; and Guggeheim Museum, Bilboa. She has been featured at the Whitney Biennial (1991, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2008), The American Century at the Whitney 2000, and WACK!  Art and the Feminist Revolution 2008,  P.S.1, Queens, NY. She was born in Pittsburgh, PA and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.