Feral Domestic

Western Front presented an exhibition by Dani and Sheilah ReStack, who use video, drawing, and photography to contemplate queer desire, family, and collaboration in a time of planetary crisis.

The exhibition featured a multi-channel installation of the video trilogy Feral Domestic (2017–22) and three artist books of drawings, writings, and images related to each work, which together document the artists’ ongoing interest in the domestic as a space of creative possibility.

Composed of the videos Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017), Come Coyote (2019), and Future From Inside (2022), the Feral Domestic trilogy traverses a seven year period in the ReStacks’ relationship as it materializes in their life and work, and intersects with questions of motherhood and reproduction.

Assembled from fragments of documentary footage, and fictional and restaged scenes with family and friends, each work moves dynamically between moments of conflict, desire, communion, joy, and the everyday. This emotional range is coupled with an attention to the natural world and the expressive potentials of colour, sound, movement, and materials—which are repeatedly cut, submerged, spilled, stitched, and buried—to provide proposals for reshaping current conventions towards new possibilities. Photographs of installation courtesy of Dennis.

Shameless Light, a reading of love letters by queer and non binary women was performed on the closing night of the show. Letters were read aloud under red neon lights as a gesture of creating space for queer love as an unruly and generative act. Thank you to letter writers: Randy Lee Cutler, Amber Dawn, Sidney Gordon, Ogheneofegor Obuwoma, Jen Sungshine and Valérie d. Walker. Photographs of performance courtesy of Rachel Topham photography.

Essay by Jac Renée Bruneau Stack of and For the ReStacks

I AM THE FIRST LESBIAN I EVER MET

I AM THE FIRST LESBIAN I EVER MET  (IATFLIEM) was commissioned by Intermedia Art Institute (IMAI) Düsseldorf for the public program, Circulating Copies 2023-2024. The work was inspired by a visit to an old age facility and conversation with queer employees and residents during a site visit in November 2023. IATFLIEM uses portraits of queer and lesbian elders in the Düsseldorf and surrounding area, interspersed with footage of Ohio lesbian elders (Older Lesbians Organizing for Change Columbus chapter), blue water and smoke as we attempt to craft a spell that will connect us to our elders and make visible existence as gendered woman, queer, old.  Curator Nele Kaczmarek states, “In the work

created for Circulating Copies, Dani and Sheilah ReStack have expanded their sphere of activity. Following discussions with local initiatives, the artists got to know a number of queer and lesbian senior citizens in Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Ohio, whom they then portrayed in video sequences. Prominently presented on the façade of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and several info screens throughout the city, I AM THE FIRST LESBIAN I EVER MET presents queer ancestors whose commitment and activism have paved the way for future generations, even though they are still underrepresented in public space and discourse.”

 

With thanks to everyone involved in the videos, Claudia Büchels, Eva Bunjy, Pam Jackson, Rosie Prince, Julia Scher, Margarete Schleicher, and Dorte Kretschmar, whose commitment made the project possible.

A Provisional Red

Series of photographic images printed on felt, collaged onto over a period of months and then held in plexiglass and secured with copper pins. Excerpts from this series commissioned by Camden Arts Center, London UK and curated into Wake Sleep Dream at Beeler Gallery, Columbus, OH. With fabrication assistance from Taylor Ross.

From the artist, “I have always been curious about how to re-direct and refuse the singularity of the photographic image. These works investigate the multiple possibilities of relation, and how that can be translated through photography. The photographs in this series were shot on 35 mm film in the summer of 2022, and include documentary images of horses, lovers, children, walks, houses across the street, kitchen tables, etc. The rolls of film held all these events equally as latent image, and they were later developed and translated to the double sided felt printed photographs that balance on concrete wedges. The photograph becomes a site for the accrual of marks made by thread, clothing, chalk, graphite. The viewer looks from multiple perspectives at the structure to try to understand how to make a whole. It is a fragile balance of materials with lines of viewing in and out of the structures that hold us -- skin, houses, rooms, relations. Looking is a way of being held.”

With thanks to the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence in Photography Award for supporting fabrication of this work.

Shameless Light

Shameless Light is an ongoing performance that invites lesbian and queer identified women and non-binary people to read love letters they have written, under red neon lights. Shameless Light was begun in 2016 in Carizzozo, New Mexico after the US election. Since then, letters have been written, and read, by community members at the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH, Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, Leslie Lohman Project Space in NY, Athena Grand, Athens, OH, TCU Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Texas and UIC, Chicago, IL.

Shameless Light privileges love as a generative, unruly and potentially radical act.  Shameless Light was installed in the street facing window of Mimosa House gallery in January 2023, and simultaneously installed at Camden Arts Centre café. We would like to thank the London letter writers who so generously wrote to love, desire, community under the red, neon funnel of light. Link to video document of letters here. This work was commissioned by Camden Arts Center.

Gabriela Cala-Lesina
Christa Holka
bones tan jones
Fa-Zah Raha
Mary W

Cuts in the Day

Cuts in the Day is the first institutional exhibition in the UK by Dani and Sheilah ReStack (b. 1972, Columbus, Ohio; b.1975, Caribou River, Nova Scotia). Produced especially for Camden Art Centre, it expands and develops the artists’ exploration of queer desire, family, climate crisis, and collaboration.

Using video, drawing and photography, the ReStacks push on the constraints of the domestic in order to yield transformation. Employing materials ranging from charcoal, felt, fur and thread, to angle iron, concrete, neon and wood, they create friction and precarity, constructing new feminist hierarchies of sense and order.

Drawing on Forrest Bess’ search for transcendence of body and mind through both painting and reconfigured corporeality, the ReStacks’ embarked on a journey to the waters of Ohio. Theirs was an attempt to communicate with Bess’ life and decision to live as artist and fisherperson in the small, rural community of Chinquapin on the Bay of Texas. The ReStacks’ attempts at communion culminates in a new video installation, Blood and Water for FCB where they draw on domestic objects, remnants of Colleen Collins’ poem In Extremis We, and recitation of women warrior names from Monique Wittig’s seminal feminist text Les Guérillères, written in 1969.

The exhibition also includes drawings by Dani and sculptural photographic works by Sheilah. In the drawings, Dani makes marks that express her commitment to Sheilah and love for their daughters. For Sheilah, her works are a way to make precarious documents out of encounter with domestic space and negotiation of identities and materials.

A presentation of the artists’ collaborative video trilogy, Feral Domestic, screens alongside the exhibition in the Reading Room. Blurring the line between the banal, the sublime, artifice and honesty, it travels the terrain of the ReStacks’ early relationship until the present day. It is filled with disagreements and compromises within family, collaboration, desire, joy and disappointment. Shot amidst the boulders of Utah, glaciers in Newfoundland, and the alleyway of their Ohio home, they activate environment as collaborator in their lesbian fantasy; set against the hegemonic culture that dominates public and private life.  Each film reminds us that in our collective conventions—sex as strictly private; family as heteronormative; motherhood as beatific; artmaking as singular— we are all complicit in mythologies of heteropatriarchal white supremacy. Feral Domestic is a collective and collaborative effort to dismantle and offer new proposals.

The ReStacks’ work speaks to a desire for connection, relation, autonomy and pleasure, as it is found within the mess of daily life. Cuts in the Day is an intimacy emergent—a love-story that celebrates and questions what it means to be a queer family in contemporary society.

Accompanying the exhibition is a free artwork by poet and musician, Colleen Collins, available in the Central Space. Commissioned by Dani and Sheilah ReStack, it is an attempt to make language for this visual experience.

Cuts in the Day at Camden Arts Centre

In Extremis We by Colleen Collins

If a Bear Knocks on the Door by Maggie Nelson.

Conversation with Daria Khan (Mimosa House Gallery) for Camden Arts Center.

The Sky's In There


This video work by Dani and Sheilah ReStack pulls the experience of becoming mother (both through fostering and bio) through the lens of personal lives that are always, also, steeped in a world where systemic racism, classism and heteronormativity influence and shape. Using documentary footage, a journey into a cave, a dream recounted and formal strategies of color, sound and movement the ReStack’s push experiences and ideas together to see what can yield or reveal.  The Sky’s In There proposes a fragmented meditation on the capacity of relation to bring about transformation. Duration 11:24, 2022. Available for rental or purchase through Video Data Bank.

Future From Inside

still from Future From Inside, 2021

Future From Inside | Dani Leventhal ReStack, Sheilah ReStack | USA | 2021 | 19 minutes 

Future From Inside is the last in the Feral Domestic trilogy. The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work. The porous line between real and fantasy is further elaborated in this video — FFI utilizes body doubles, a continuing journey for answers and oracles, animal synthesis, queer desire, children and radical community to weave a fragmented future. This final offering of the trilogy does not offer answers to the personal and societal conflict, but continues the possibility of the feral domestic as a way to inhabit the space of living to yield surprising results.

“It is not enough to say that Dani and Sheilah ReStack make artistic home movies; for them, there is no separation between art and domestic life. But this is no Neverland, no matter how idyllic their romps in Midwestern fields may appear. For women, utopia must be grounded in the concrete, with full awareness of the multiple and often conflicting roles they inhabit. Amid these contradictions, the Feral Domestic films show how the home can nurture a sense of vibrant possibility in an increasingly narrow and uninhabitable world.”


-Genevieve Yue, The Film Comment Letter

Control is Cassandra

Control is Cassandra gets its title from an essay by Ann Carson, “Cassandra Float Can.” The title figure, Cassandra is a priestess in Greek Mythology, cursed to utter prophecies that are always true but never believed. In this curious position ReStack places “control”. Throughout her work, ReStack explores the way her identities—mother, lover, artist, friend—are filled with the anxiety and wonder of being (and not being) in control of connection and outcome.

She writes: “I see my work as a way to hold things down. As a way to place materials in a particular relation to achieve the control I desire. I am faced with the refusal of the material to act as I wish—the stitch that doesn’t take, the leather that won’t hold, the writing erased. These material lags and refusals correspond to the refusals of my pre-teen daughter; the pull of my lover; the needs of the young child we are fostering; and the strain of living in a world that holds inequities and erasures...”

In Control is Cassandra each of these facets of ReStack’s life inform new photo-based sculptures, as well as a project using polaroids as an attempt to document through opacity. Combining materials from many registers—rubber bands, concrete, plastics, clothing, fur, gold leaf and a wide range of photographic materials—ReStack constructs pieces that viscerally incorporate risk, tension and fragility as metaphors for the many other kinds of precarity in our lives.

Brought together for the first time at The Blue Building Gallery, ReStack’s works in Control is Cassandra invite viewers into a sense of instability but strive toward balance. They embody the tension between the feral and the domestic; motherhood and queer sexulaity; the softness of intimate bodies and the hardness of the world built around them.

Director TBB Emily Falencki, and Ryan Josey

To Draw the Sky before the Ground

In a continuation of their collaborative installation practice, Dani and Sheilah ReStack have created a site specific installation at Haus zur Liebe in Switzerland. This installation furthers their practice of expanding dialogue between historical and contemporary occupation of space by queer, desiring, domestic, gendered and familial bodies. For this installation, the artists are in conversation with the previous usage of the space as an art atelier for children (1970s to 2010s) that operated using the philosophy of Arno Stern. The title, To Draw the Sky before the Ground, is in reference to his acknowledgement, and support, of the order in which children organize space while painting. 

In the first room the artists recorded their family, stacked together in their studio in Columbus, Ohio. They form an indeterminate mass of daughter, mother, artist, lover. The re-staging of domestic and creative space in the Haus zur Liebe becomes a set made of materials ranging from cardboard to balsa, charcoal, chalk, wigs, mesh and other materials pulled from artistic and domestic registers. An accompanying soundtrack of a list poem composed of children's descriptions of Rhoda Kellog’s line drawing catalog is heard in the space. Rhoda Kellog was a psychologist, children arts researcher, and proponent of the necessary free form of children’s art making, much in the same way as Arno Stern. 

In the back room the artists have installed the second in their trilogy of video works, Feral Domestic. Come Coyote (2020) continues the fragmented curiosity for experimental narrative and meaning through making – all while using their relationship, family and creative life and conflicts as generative catalyst.  

Link to video of installation.


Excerpt form List Poem of Childrens Interpretations of Rhoda Kellog’s Line Catalog

Single Crossed Circle

Multiple Loop Line 

Undifferentiated Line

Girl Laying down Line

Looks like snow, looks like eyes and a boomerang

Spiral Line

Looks like before I could say your name. Looks like outside when it is too bright to tell where things are.

Roving Enclosing Line 

Looks like a pie, looks like wings 

and inside the wings a beach with the foam on top of the waves

Spiral Line 

Multiple Circular Line 

Multiple Diagonal Line 

Line for keeping

Looks like a rag towel

A rag

Zigzag or waving line


Shameless Light

Shameless Light, a continuing project of love letters by womxn identified queers. Project began in 2016. In Fort Worth, Texas, we were able to make contact with queers who either grew up in, or currently lived in, Fort Worth. The love letters were recorded and projected onto the exterior of the Fine Arts buildings on the TCU campus. This projection event was in conjunction with the show, Stack for Martha’s Sisters at the TCU Contemporary. Both the show and the performance allowed ways of imprinting queer love by placing the queer body in space — making ephemeral declaration through existence, through language, through light, through feeling.

Shameless Light was projected on October 20, 2021 and we offer thanks to letter writers Sharon Herrera, Bee Grey, Ivy Thistler, Maura Guardiola and Kim Nguyen.

Stack for Martha's Sisters

Stack for Martha’s Sisters is a commissioned work for Fort Worth Contemporary Arts TCU, Fort Worth, Texas consisting of 3 projection installations and a broadside takeaway. The show ran from September 10-October 30, 2021. Stack for Martha’s Sisters is a queer feminist imagining of alternative spaces of being, family and creation. The video installations are intended as portals of fragmented imagination — accessible through contemplation of past women’s communities, and channeling a horizontal possibility of influence, history and making. For the artists, Dani and Sheilah ReStack, the Sanctified Sisters of Belton, Texas were a major inspiration in making the work. The Sanctified Sisters was founded by Martha McWhirter in the late 1860s, after she had a dream in the kitchen of separating from her husband and making community with women similarly interested in leaving their husbands, and pursuing an alternative lifestyle. The history of the Sanctified Sisters infuses the installation at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts as the artists used this historical legend, which exists without physical trace except for a plaque in the town of Belton, as catalyst.

The artists returned to their home state of Ohio after a site visit in June, 2021, and visited the Susan B Anthony Womyns Land in Athens, Ohio. The Susan B. Anthony Land was founded in the 1990’s and continues to serve an intentional queer population interested in living or camping rurally. The filming for Stack for Martha’s Sisters occurred in the outdoor kitchen, and Star cabin, at the Susan B. Anthony Memorial Land (Subamuh) in summer of 2021. The artists, Dani + Sheilah, and their children are part of the creation and interaction with the space of stacking, feral domestic possibility and alternative queer family collaboration. 

Alongside Stack for Martha’s Sisters the artists also present Shameless Light at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts. This is an ongoing project where invited queer identified participants submit love letters that are then read aloud under two red, neon funnels. At TCU, the artists are hosting an outdoor screening of Fort Worth queer identified womxn reading love letters on October 20, 2021.

Install images courtesy TCU Gallery Director Lynné Bowman Cravens and Brad Flowers. Video of installation.

Three Gestures

How is a photograph a breath?

The holding together is a breath.

I want to use balance and precarity together in the skin of the photograph. I want to see the photographic document made vast--capacious enough to hold materials pulled from various registers of the world—refusing 2 dimensionality.

Photographic documents can be generated by:

1. Placing photo paper on feet for the duration of a day, then developing them in the darkroom.

2. Printing photos on felted fleece, becoming material warmth: a blanket, a texture, a touch.

3. Placing into a precarious balance -- held with rubber bands, plexi, copper piercings, angle iron, rocks. Angle iron touches plexi; plexi magnifies the photographic paper; the photographic paper holds a letter to my daughter.

The resulting balance is an abstraction; it is a construction. Image pushed together through my touch deciding the relation, placed on a wedge, pulled out and held with a rock. The resulting works call out to the body of the viewer. One must move around the image to see it, a photograph in fragments of dimensionality and relation.

The work -- and its subjects -- and its participants -- an exhaled balance with time, environment, material.

Message for My Daughter

Morse code lantern, Message for My Daughter, installed at Sointula Art Residency Window Gallery, Sointula Island, BC. Curated by Kerri Reid. Message blinked across the water day and night, for a month. An excerpt from the message reads, “does the sound of the bird // travel to how many ears // can I be a kind human // listen // to the rest of the artists here // can I slow down and feel // the moment this pencil is // a distraction does my daughter // remember me when I am gone // does my daughter know I love her // does my lover know I love her // what is enough care // who measures // who can tell me more”.

The constructed and shared public space around us is rarely used for expression of feeling, for the language of poetry. Lighthouses were to signal danger, morse code was used for important messages of safety and war. Yet these mediums also served to signal presence, and possibility for communication. In this project the use is re-directed into a personal message from a mother to her daughter.

Hold Hold Spill

Exhibition at Interface Gallery, Oakland, CA (July 17-August 23, 2020)

Excerpt from Press Release:

Hold Hold Spill includes a series of ReStack’s walking prints, made by attaching photo paper to her feet as she navigates between her professional, personal and domestic life—as lover, artist, teacher, friend, mother. These prints are developed in the dark room and pieced together as an index of this navigation through time, space and social roles. Explored during the artist’s residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in 2016, the prints have taken on dimensional form as ReStack invents ways of collaging and pressing into and against other materials. The walking prints function as ground for adding materials from registers of daily life, held through pressure of rubber bands and plexiglass. Also included in the exhibition are photograms made by pressing the artist’s body and that of her loved ones against photographic paper, and exposing under the light of an enlarger. The images capture the specificity of physical connection in an abstracted version of real time. As with the walking prints, the photograph serves as a starting point for addition of other materials -- ultimately forming a lexicon of value that is additive, complete only when held in a precarious balance. Collectively, this exhibition reflects a feminist inquiry into the possibility of an embodied photograph. As ReStack writes, “What results is of the photograph, but also something more unknowable. It holds a form; with shards of recognition and specificity. It is my attempt to build something that can be as precarious and tentative as the multivalent self in relation to another.” A series of writings responding to the work will be released over the duration of the exhibition as part of the gallery’s Creative Engagements series. In a time of limited social contact due to Covid 19, the writings are offered as a strategy for connection around the work and the themes it explores, providing points of access, reflection, and even intimacy, from afar. Participating writers include: Elena Gross, Anna Lee, Dionne Lee, Eileen Myles, Em Rooney, and Jo-Ey Tang. A conversation between Leeza Meksin and ReStack will also be offered as part of the series.

Interview with Leeza Meksin about works in Hold Hold Spill.

Eileen Myles response to Hold Rose Anna Lee Portal Pressed Flat

Em Rooney Two Rabbits or A Coiled Snake Dionne Lee Running List

Elena Gross The Walking Prints Jo-ey Tang 2020 is 1990

Catalogue for Hold Hold Spill designed by Sarah Hewitt.

Yellow for Joan

in

Yellow for Joan is an installation loop excerpted from a longer collaborative video (with Dani ReStack), Go Ask Joan. The video installation (with Dani ReStack) is an immersive sculptural space shifting from literal representation via video projection, to abstraction when the image disappears and the light from the projector emphasizes the construction of the set.

LET THERE BE NO MASTERY

The photograph as static representation fails to capture my relationship to place, identity, or experience of time. I want to make it speak as a medium of the body, through the body. I use strategies of body contact, cumulative marks and gestural iterations, to generate an ongoing index of imprint. I hope that the obstruction of the body, the rubbings of the land, and the fragments that are generated can create a path towards improbable monuments; to the time in between time, the identity in between identities, the hovering of multiples.

These photo sculptural works are begun by attaching photo paper to my feet, then going about my day. When I am done, I develop them in the darkroom where they reveal marks of light, contact, and wear through the photographic material. The work was begun in the period after becoming a mother; as a gesture towards documenting the in between of identities and often undocumented moments as I moved through studio, dropoff, playdate, work, students, home, artist, mother, lover, teacher, friend, artist, mother lover, child, mentor. The photograph became a way to make proof of the continuance of the body between states.

The resulting image is a cumulative mark of time and place – a photographic sculptural encounter that physically holds my experience as queer artist, lover, mother while also crafting it as a new provisional structure. The works lean, or balance improbably, on the floor, on top of cement structures, on wooden platforms. These precarious balances hold the proof, the remnants, the newly made form.

 

Come Coyote

in

“The second in a planned trilogy of films about desire and domesticity that began with Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017), Come Coyote examines issues around queer reproduction, intimacy, and motherhood. Collaborators and partners Dani and Sheilah ReStack capture in fleeting, diaristic images the tender and terrifying feelings they have around ushering new life into the world, conveyed with both humor and a powerful immediacy. “

Text from Projections, NYFF 2019 catalogue

Trailer for Come Coyote. For more information contact the Video Data Bank.

Shameless Light

Shameless Light is an ongoing performance that invites queer women identified to read love letters they have written, under red neon megaphones. Shameless Light privileges love as a generative, unruly and potentially radical act. It is a venue for queer desire.

The reading environment includes a 9 minute loop of our love letter to Chantal Ackerman; Kitchen Circle for Ackerman. Readers stand on a rug made of felt, hide and paint. After the readings are complete, we clear the stage for a screening of SOTD (Strangely Ordinary This Devotion).

Shameless Light was initiated in 2015 by Dani and Sheilah ReStack in Carizzozo, New Mexico. Since then, letters have been written, and read, by community members at the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH, Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, Leslie Lohman Project Space in NY, Athens, OH and UIC, Chicago, IL.

If you are interested in reading or submitting a letter please contact sheilah.restack@gmail.com or danirestack@gmail.com

House Becomes You

House Becomes You is an important part of the continuing proposal for new forms of family, representation, queer desire, motherhood, and environment, through a re-working of image and how image encounters materials. In all our collaborations, we mine the experiences of the personal as potential to fracture and access the larger experience of visuality, body and inhabitation of space.

The materials have a range of hierarchies of provisionality. The idea of re-making and fabrication of a material and narrative are both important to how the finished work occupies and makes uneasy in the space. All of the images are sourced from videos that we have shot for Strangely Ordinary This Devotion or A Hand In Two Ways; Fisted. The felted video stills are a basis for a new contingency of material and image inhabitation.

“The stills act as a background for material constructions that range from handmade holders for plexiglass to the stitching of colored gels onto the felted image. The works are marked by their conflation of material and content— foam, felt, bags of water, steel and plexiglass, frame the vulnerable physical body that is presented as erotic, sutured, slack and banal. In bringing unlike things together, the exhibition joins the feral with the domestic in a radiant illumination of queer desire, motherhood, and human understanding.” Erin Woodbrey Gaa gallery

A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted)

A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted) is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions.  Animals, human bodies, children, ritual and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire and a visceral movement.

Directed by Dani and Sheilah Restack, 7 minute loop, 2017. Distributed by VTape.