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
