Peggy Ahwesh: The Night Sky

Peggy Ahwesh: The Night Sky
August 19–November 2, 2025
Multipurpose Hall

Curve the Night Sky (Peggy Ahwesh, US 2021) 4K Digital Video, 5 mins.
The Summer Triangle (Peggy Ahwesh, US 2023) 4K Digital Video, 5 mins.

Active in film since the late 1970s, Peggy Ahwesh (American, b. 1954) has created an expansive body of work covering a diverse and eclectic range of filmmaking styles.
                                                                      
The Night Sky is a pair of experimental videos that evoke the sensation of being outside during the summertime as the evening twilight fades into the darkness of night. Using time-lapse cinematography combined with long exposures, Ahwesh’s camera points skyward as illuminated terrestrial features emerge, shift, and recede against the vastness of space. The main audio track is performed by Radio Guitar, Ahwesh’s sound collaboration with artist Barbara Ess.

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Still from Curve the Night Sky. Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery.

“During the pandemic era of 2020 and 2021 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 condensed and sped up the experience, in seeming contradiction. I waved my arms to trip the neighbors’ motion-sensitive lights to magical effect on the trees in my backyard.” - Peggy Ahwesh

The following is an excerpt from a conversation about The Night Sky that took place in June 2025 between Peggy Ahwesh (PA) and Curator Gordon Nelson (GN).

GN: Hi Peggy. Can we talk about The Night Sky?

PA:
Okay.

GN:
In your description of The Night Sky, you mention that the videos were made during the pandemic era. I appreciate knowing that because, although it isn’t essential information to enjoy the work, I feel like having that knowledge adds a layer to the experience.

PA:
Yeah. That's totally true. I'm not a particularly patient person, but slowing down, having no deadlines, not having that much engagement with other people and not having a lot of social chatter around allowed me to make those films. They're really reflective of my experience and my life during that time. Being upstate (NY), being kind of isolated, I started them during the lockdown. They were also a new way of being in touch with my environment here and a new connection to my town. I got really turned on to the magic of what happens at night.

GN:
Your method of working is sometimes described as bricolage where you are pulling together disparate elements, but this work feels different in that it doesn't use that same kind of approach.

PA:
Right. But, you know, one thing which has been a driving force in my work from the beginning is a sense of play and a sense of improvisation and spontaneity. That's the other driving force that goes through all of this project. For example, in my early Super-8 movies, I start by messing around with people and shooting for fun.

So that quality, or like the video game movie, She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh, 2001), where I'm just playing the game and collecting the footage, and then afterward make a sense of order through editing. It was the playing of the game, the playfulness of it, which was my original inspiration.

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Still from Curve the Night Sky. Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery.

Basically what would get me out every night to shoot was just,What is going to happen? What is going to happen this time? Every time there was something different. I never knew what I was going to get until I came home, transferred the footage off the card, and put it into a timeline in editing software and scrubbed through it. I never knew what I had until I did that. The time expansion and compression is just really unusual when you shoot time lapse. I'd be out for hours and I would watch and I'd say, “Oh, I think the moon moved from there to there, but I'm not even sure.”

Clouds would roll by, stars would come up, a plane would go by, a satellite or whatever. But you don't really know what you have until you bring it home and put it on the timeline. Then those hours of experience get reduced to like 20 seconds.

GN:
What you're mentioning now reminds me of nature photography or nature cinematography where a filmmaker needs to wait for the right moment. Is that something you've done before?

PA:
No, but I do like to play around with new technology. I like to play around with new and alternative technologies, which has been an interesting thing for me. Originally, what started the whole thing was to go out and just sit around at night and wait for the deer to come by my backyard, and to watch the slowly revolving sky. Then it occurred to me that I should get a camera to shoot it. First, I was just experiencing it by myself with a cup of tea on the back porch. Then I thought, “Oh, I should get a camera.” And I realized that from my school, I could borrow one of these incredible DSLR cameras, with an ASA of 20,000. You can make the middle of the night look like noon if you want.

GN:
Does technology drive your ideas?

PA:
Sometimes it does, actually. Because I like to experiment and see what the technology will do. And then the artist’s prerogative is to use and also misuse a technology. You know, you have a symbiotic relationship with technology and it offers certain kinds of opportunities. So in this case, to shoot time lapse and rely heavily on a tripod, the ideas do become wedded to the tools.
 

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Still from Curve the Night Sky. Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery.

I had a big camera with a big lens on a tripod. I'd be out on a dirt road in the country near my car. I would simply set the camera running, which is not my normal way of working. Usually, I'm usually much more present and moving around and making more of a sculptural definition of the world by my moving around and people moving around, so working with the DSLR camera became a new experience.

I never went more than a mile from my house. So it just became part of my nightly thing. Sometimes I would sit at the camera, then come back and have dinner, then go back out because a lot of the shots take place in my backyard. The fireflies, the flowers, the windy trees,  that's my backyard. 

 

GN:
Can I next ask about the soundtracks by Radio Guitar, your sound duo with Barbara Ess (1944–2021). I think that there is magic happening with how the ambiance created by the audio interplays with the imagery.

PA:
The soundtracks are a collage of different Radio Guitar tracks mixed with field recordings. Barbara, now deceased, my collaborator and I would get together at her place and record and play for hours. So we didn't really make pieces, we constructed them into distinct tracks afterward. I edited chunks of our music into the movies. Then, I added in weather sounds, drone sounds, noise, and machinery sounds.

In some ways these films are all about Barbara, and it occurs to me now that maybe I should add a title that says “dedicated to Barbara.” When I made the first one, I showed a rough cut to her and she didn't like it. She resents that the footage was just beautiful. That drove her crazy. What she said was “not enough gray matter,” meaning brain matter or not enough intellectual subject matter. So I made some adjustments based on her suggestions. She often didn’t like something when I first showed it to her, but she'd like it later.  We never had the chance for her to like the films when they were completed because she had already died.

GN:
Did you have working parameters that Barbara would only play guitar and you handled the other things?

PA:
Well, she was really into nature’s soundscape and field recordings. I think the storm was hers. We would go out together and wander around and record, then the dynamics and full potential of the track would take shape in post-production.

GN:
That sounds like a great way to work.

PA:
It was good. It was really good for us. That's how we worked.