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Thursday, April 1, 1999

Peggy's Playhouse: A Peggy Ahwesh Retrospective

Dead Men: Nocturne, The Color of Love & More

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts





Co-sponsored by Yerba Buena Gardens Center for the Arts.

One of the most exciting and challenging media artists working today, Peggy Ahwesh is the Center for the Arts’ first Wattis Film/Video Artist-in-Residence, and she will be present for a unique retrospective of her work paired with works which have influenced her. With a low/no-budget aesthetic and a penchant for exploring sexuality, violence and language, Ahwesh’s work breaks all the rules—fearlessly confronting both the civilized and transgressive elements that contribute to our socially inherited histories and private notions of self. Along with of Ahwesh’s major films and videos, the series also includes work by Tod Browning, Doris Wishman, Andy Warhol and others.

Tonight is the San Francisco premiere of Ahwesh’s latest film Nocturne by Ahwesh, a horror film which combines Pixelvision with images from Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Flesh, and text from Kathy Acker, the Marquis de Sade and Steven Shaviro. Shown with: Jean Painleve’s 1944 The Vampire, a haunting documentary about bats; As Tears Go By, two versions of this song by Marianne Faithful, perky and sweet in 1966 and sad and slow in 1987, revealing the devastating toll of drugs and rock-and-roll; and The Color of Love by Ahwesh, featuring two women and a dead man in a decaying 70s porno flick.

The retrospective continues as follows:

Friday, April 2, 8 pm Vision Machines (the vision machine, Martina’s Playhouse and more);

Friday, April 2, 9:30 pm Scary Movies (The Scary Movie and The Unknown by Browning)

Wednesday, April 7, 8 pm Philosophies in the Bedroom (The Deadman by Ahwesh and Sanborn, Philosophy in the Bedroom, Parts 1 and 2, Trick Film, and more by Warhol and Wishman)

Friday, April 16, 8 pm Strange Space (Strange Weather by Ahwesh and Strosser and Michael Klier’s The Giant)