"Despite its international prominence among scholars, curators, and her fellow artists, Ahwesh’s work has always retained an outsider’s peripheral energy. Raised in a working-class family during Pittsburgh’s long industrial decline (and following the rise of her hometown compatriot Andy Warhol), Ahwesh arrived at film and art making via punk—both the music and the antiauthoritarian attitude. For decades, her work has bedeviled avant-garde cinema’s tendency to valorize mechanical expertise and andro-auteurist mastery, embracing instead a trickster’s tenacious ever-inventiveness and a gleeful impiety. She is the artist as darting fox, not single-minded hedgehog."