2018

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