2020

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.