2026

Archive of Queer Embrace

The Archive of Queer Embrace (AQE) uses the documentary truth of photography and the performative potential of queer intimacy to create photographic portraits that are installed in various parks and trails of Tantramar, New Brunswick. The project is realized by artist Sheilah ReStack, who was the Pierre Lassonde Visiting Artist  in residence at Mt. Allison for the winter semester 2026. ReStack worked with Mt. Allison Studio Art interns to solicit regional participants for the project, as well as local art organizations and community groups. The call that was put out was a request for,  queer identified to come to the darkroom, and have their image taken with the people(s) or object(s) they loved. The idea of touch, embrace, and the possibility of queer images becoming  part of a public space and conversation was the initial impulse behind the work.

ReStack grew up in Pictou County, Nova Scotia — and at that time there was very little, if any, positive representation of queer life or love in public space, or discourse. In many ways, ReStack sees the work, “As a way to offer one possibility for an archive of queer feeling. Sometimes I think these ghostly images (AQE) give connection to our ancestors, and provide a way to imagine ourselves into the past and future.” Images were created by participants lying on the enlarger bed in the darkroom and, through exposure to light, producing a photogram. A photogram is a direct printing technique onto photo sensitive material. The resulting documents hold the mark of the body, the medium specific chemical truth of photographic processes, and the non-indexical abstraction of the created image. These movements between recognition and abstraction, truth and gesture, document and shadow, are all important ways to consider the queer archive as a place of opacity and visibility.

(Text from Tantramar Active Living and Culture publicity)

The interpretive signage in each of the five locations states;

 The Archive of Queer Embrace is a method for gestures of queer intimacy and touch to become legitimate historical documents.

 The Archive of Queer Embrace believes that archives (as they currently exist and have historically existed) need more heterogeneity, more intervention, more ephemera, more imagination, more mess.

 The Archive of Queer Embrace strives to move the documents of an archive into the space of lived experience— a shared environment where bodies work, play, eat, walk, and understand themselves, in relation.

 The Archive of Queer Embrace celebrates both visibility and opacity as necessary strategies in the shifting creation of identity and existence.

The interviews recorded while doing photogram portraits will be later aired on Sackville radio station CHMA, and a free publication will be launched in 2026/7, as part of the project. ReStack would like to acknowledge the support of Mt. Allison Pierre Lassonde Visiting Artist Residency, the Studio Art faculty of Mt. Allison, RC Good fellowship from Denison University, Mt. Allison student interns, the over fifty local people who participated in the project, and the traditional and unceded indigenous land of the Mi'kmaq Nation, which holds the images.

Dream as Dissent

Taking Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette as catalyst, Dani and Sheilah ReStack invited community members to join them for a collective reading on the longest day of the year - solstice - June 21, 2026 - as part of Solar Flare, curated by Rebecca Arp.

Notley’s epic poem verges into, and is informed by, dreams.  Dreams are a place of curiosity and potential empowerment. They offer a place where the unconscious can be heard and translated. Dreams defy sense. Dreams are the bridge between waking and sleeping life. The ReStacks’ propose the longest day of the year as preparation of the descent into dreaming time – shorter days and longer nights. Dreamtime allows for new ways to imagine ourselves and the world – a crucial capacity for unrecognizable forms to offer into our current social and political landscapes.

The project began with a garden planted with herbs to aid in dreaming at the Broad St. Church, followed by construction of a dream machine (Brian Gysin 1959) out of ceramics and included fabrication of spandex photogram material banners generated from dream machine patterns turned into photograms. All of these materials provided the various forms around which the reading was staged on solstice. The reading took place from 1PM until 10:15PM, when the tyrant was slain in Notley’s text. Thank you to the readers, and to Onni Estabrook for dream machine fabrication.

Vimeo link to documentation of Dream as Dissent performance on solstice 2026.

Line as Real as Broken

Dani and Sheilah ReStack presented work at the Center for Cultural and Artistic Practices in Winnipeg, curated as part of the 14th annual Winnipeg Underground Film Festival,  from June 3-16, 2026. In this show, they offered a segment of their latest film, Stovepipe to the Sun, as well as presenting physical works.

Their new film combines research into a 19th century separatist women's community in Belton, Texas with speculative filmmaking, as the ReStack’s cast themselves and friends as present-day descendants of the Sanctified Sisters.  Interwoven into the research and narrative is autobiographical recording of their domestic life, as they struggle to raise their teenage daughter in our patriarchal society.

The Sanctified Sisters provide an intriguing crack in  history -- a women’s religious colony begun in 1870, existing inside (and outside) of the patriarchal and gendered world of Texas. The group’s founder (Martha McWhirter) was making biscuits in the kitchen when she felt summoned to gather a group of women who would separate from the established church and do things their own way. The claiming of domestic space as a potential site for inspiration and possibility is part of the ReStack’s idea of feral domestic. Since their collaborative work on Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2015), they have been committed to defamiliarizing the domestic sphere -- exploring the possibility of movement within spaces that are historically considered uninteresting, closed down, and, unsurprisingly, gendered female. In this “in progress” edition of Stovepipe to the Sun, offers a world montaged formally, as well as through temporal jumps between the 19th and 21st century, of women searching for a queer, feminist alternative.

One of the important facets that drew the ReStack’s to study this historical group of women was their reliance on dreams as their form of decision making. To honor this process, there are several dream sequences extracted from the larger piece, Stovepipe to the Sun, running as single channel loops on monitors in the upper gallery.

Also included are the ReStack’s individual responses to dreams, as they intersect with daily life: as symbol, form, and question. Dani’s drawing and Sheilah’s photography practice are used as strands in the deconstruction and construction of forms to give meaning – seen here in a continuation of a previous project, Etel’s Up Trap.  Photographs of daily life, animals, and the larger context of current events are combined with drawing, sewing, and painting. These collaborative documents (with painting by their youngest daughter, Sky) create a synthesis of the real and the imagined, the personal and the international, the pull of desire and the horror of war —  movements in and out that occur in the passage of days and must somehow be integrated, protested, honored, observed.  Also included is work from Dream Documents, compiled by Sheilah, of her own dreams and their analysis, over the past year. These photographic works use recorded dreams as material for creation of unique photograms displayed on pink shelves. They vacillate between archival material and accumulation and formal cacophony of sense, order, and analysis.

In sum, the upstairs presentation of source materials (dreams, daily life, news) is entry to the downstairs offering of a speculative historical fiction, as an attempt at synthesis and response to the conditions of life in this contemporary world -rife with the problems of capitalism, racism, patriarchy, misogyny.  The ReStacks’ work tears a hole into the future, which as Etel Adnan stated, “…you realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive.”

From press release and curators, Scott Fitzpatrick and Madeline Bogosch 

Shape of Enter

This project was begun at the Château de la Napoule Canadian Artist Residency, April 2026. A group tour on one of the first days of the residency introduced us to the history of the château, including the founders, Henry and Marie Clews. They decided to be buried on the property in elaborate tombs, with doors wedged open--so their spirits could intermingle.  I was immediately struck by the shape of the wedged space created by these slightly opened tomb doors, and the idea of something invisible being invited forth.  The pull towards the wedged form, combined with my interest in where invisible queer histories might live in an environment like the château instigated this body of work: The Shape of Enter. I was curious about how the symbol and history of a castle would still hold, undoubtedly (although probably invisibly), queer, and other, minor histories and stories. Castles, queens, princesses, are all part of our archetypal understanding of power, hierarchy, gender, desire --  and in many ways they enforce a normative order. This work employs the same tools as fairytales, castles, and fantasy, but emerges with no damsels and no hetero love story. Instead, it points  to an abiding curiosity about how to craft a history when one doesn’t exist in formal ways. What scrap of paper, what silence, what wedged open door holds a story of queer love that was not recorded?  In this work, I proceeded to document the structures and objects in the château that were slightly open, that resisted closing when I tried.  One of the first such shapes I found was the fireplace door in my studio. It was wedged, almost closed, at an angle. This site became inspiration for the finding of other locations of refusal, as well motivation to make my own shape in its image.

Using lumen prints (photographic materials exposed to sun and then fixed) the sculptural wedge shape became a ghostly instruction manual installed in vertical lines throughout her studio. In my other research at the château, I found 11 sites as potential entrance points for queer spirits, untold histories, and possibility.

Thank you to the David R. Graham Foundation, as well as the LNAF staff.