Looking for participants in Archive of Queer Embrace

  

Call for Sackville and Surrounding Area:

My name is Sheilah ReStack — I am a queer artist raised in Nova Scotia (alumni of Mt. Allison :) and currently living in Columbus, Ohio. I teach at Denison University and am on leave for the semester to be artist in residence at Mt. Allison Purdy Crawford Center for the Arts.  

 
I am working on the Archive of Queer Embrace, a long-term project gathering portraits of queer touch, and placing them into public space. It is important to me that the community itself from here be the ones who are infiltrating this space.  

 

To this end, I am looking for queer/gay / lesbian/ nonbinary folks in the area (and anyone who can get to Sackville) who would be willing to have their photogram* portrait taken in the darkroom at Mt. Allison over the next month, with someone/something they love.  

  

I grew up in rural Nova Scotia, and I have long been interested in how to articulate and make visible rural, queer experience and existence. I would (ultimately) like to have these images infiltrate public space in some way, and there is support from the town of Sackville for that to occur. You can always choose to participate in the photogram and then decide not to present the image in public. 

 

I would like to invite to join me in the darkroom at Mount Allison to make a photogram. The time commitment is about ½ hour with your partner(s), people and/or objects you love. Please reach out with any questions.  

  

*(A photogram is a camera-less photographic technique that creates a direct print by shining enlarger light onto objects (or people, in this case). Participants will be provided with 8.5 x 11 prints of the images. 
 

Please contact me to book at slot: sheilahrestack@gmail.com or T. 614 531 7553  

 

Julie Rae and Celina, Archive of Queer Embrace, 2023.

Hold Hold Spill

Upcoming solo show at Interface Gallery in Oakland, California. Curated by Suzanne L’Heureux.The exhibition will include a series of ReStack’s walking prints, made by attaching photo paper to her feet as she navigates between her professional, perso…

Upcoming solo show at Interface Gallery in Oakland, California. Curated by Suzanne L’Heureux.

The exhibition will include 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.

Time Share Mentorship for Atlantic Canada based artist mentored by Dani and Sheilah ReStack

Photo taken night of ReStack screening at Struts/ Faucet January 11, 2020. Thank you Sackville!!

Photo taken night of ReStack screening at Struts/ Faucet January 11, 2020. Thank you Sackville!!

Deadline to apply: Monday, January 27, 2020, 5:00pm

Time Share is a new annual mentorship program initiated by Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre. On January 27, 2020 we are welcoming applications from emerging film/video artists working in the Atlantic region to participate as a Mentee. 

The successful applicant will have access to all equipment and resources at the centre to work on a new film or video project with guidance from this year’s Mentors Dani and Sheilah ReStack through bi-weekly digital conference meetings over six months. The finished film or video project will be presented during Summer 2020. 

Please join us for a masterclass and screening of Dani and Sheilah ReStack’s work at the gallery on January 11, 2020, 7:00 pm. 

ReStack collaborations have shown at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Iceberg Projects Chicago, Toronto International Film Festival, Images Film Festival, Toronto, Lyric Theater, Carrizozo, NM, Leslie Lohman Museum Gay and Lesbian Art Project Space, Gaa Wellfleet, New York Film Festival, Berwick International Film Festival , Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio and many other locations. They have received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council and Visual Studies Workshop, NY. They have been residents at The Headlands in Marin County and their newest video Go Ask Joan was made at the MacDowell Colony this past summer.

TO APPLY, PLEASE SEND: 

  1. Project proposal: a brief description of your project (max 250 words)

  2. A brief bio (max 250 words)

  3. Documentation of your work: up to ten image or ten minutes of audio-visual material. All images and audio-visual material must be Mac compatible. 

  4. Current curriculum vitae

All submissions must arrive at the gallery before 5:00 PM ADT on January 27. Please send submissions to info@strutsgallery.ca

MacDowell Colony Fellowship July/August 2019

Still from video we are working on while in residence, Go Ask Joan.Forthcoming release with Maria Petsching’s Journey Anthology, which will premiere in December at MAMUK Austria. Thank you to Joan Larkin (pictured) poet and inspiration we are so gra…

Still from video we are working on while in residence, Go Ask Joan.

Forthcoming release with Maria Petsching’s Journey Anthology, which will premiere in December at MAMUK Austria. Thank you to Joan Larkin (pictured) poet and inspiration we are so grateful to have met here.

Shameless Light and SOTD at Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester

October 6  at 7PM at Visual Studies Workshop
 

Sheilah and Dani ReStack will present their multi-media performance, Shameless Light, followed by a screening of, Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, a single channel video featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. 

Shameless Light privileges love as a generative, unruly and potentially radical act through public reading of love letters. This ongoing project creates a venue for female desire through the reading of love letters of women identified as queer. 

Screen Shot 2018-09-06 at 9.17.57 AM.png

Shameless LIght at Gallery 400 University Illinois, Chicago

ReStack's present their performance, Shameless Light on October 10, 6pm as part of the Voices lecture series. Shameless Light is a reading of love letters by queer women under the glow of red neon. It has been performed in Ohio, New Mexico, and New York. (SOTD) Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a long-term collaborative video experiment between the ReStacks into feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under threat of climate change.

Please join us! 

Tuesday, October 9, 2018 – 6:00PM to 7:30PM
Gallery 400
400 S. Peoria

 

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House Becomes You at Gaa Gallery, Wellfleet

DANI LEVENTHAL RESTACK + SHEILAH WILSON RESTACK

HOUSE BECOMES YOU

AUGUST 16 – OCTOBER 6, 2018

Opening Reception Thursday, August 16, 6-8pm

Gaa Gallery Welfleet

 

 

Gaa Gallery Wellfleet is pleased to announce the August 16 opening of House Becomes You, a collaborative exhibition of works by Dani (Leventhal) ReStack and Sheilah (Wilson) ReStack. House Becomes You features sculptural collage and video work that mine the visceral layers of meaning embedded in collective notions of family, domesticity, and physical desire.

 

The works in House Becomes You use video stills that are pulled from A Hand in Two Ways; Fisted (2017). 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.

Push down for Laura, 2018Cardboard box, steel, charcoal, pastel, acetate, video still on synthetic fleece blanket.59x37x15

Push down for Laura, 2018

Cardboard box, steel, charcoal, pastel, acetate, video still on synthetic fleece blanket.

59x37x15

Public Intimacies at Images Festival, Toronto

"Public Intimacies" is an exhibition of moving image installations taking place in hotel rooms at the Super 8 Hotel in Toronto’s Chinatown. Speaking to the boundaries between public and private space, the works challenge our notions of domesticity and contemplate themes of intimacy, expressions of sexuality, desire, and identity.

Monday, April 16, 3-4PM
A conversation between Jon Wang, Dani Restack, and Sheilah Restack, our featured artists at the Super 8 Hotel moderated by Richard Fung. 

A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted)
Dani Restack and Sheilah Restack
USA/CANADA, 2017, DIGITALVIDEO, 7 MIN
A two-way portrait composed from a series of intimate and banal excerpts from the artists’ lives together, we are sent through a looping meditation of bodily encounters. Guided by a collective intuition, a fluid movement begins through opaque landscapes of flesh, into nocturnal mystery, and erotic expressions.

Cindy Sherman as Feminist Question Mark

How do we understand artist Cindy Sherman’s work in the context of feminism when she has repeatedly disavowed any relationship to feminism writ large? In this afternoon gallery talk, artist and professor Sheilah Wilson (Denison University) will look at historical and contemporary questions of intent as they relate to Sherman’s depiction of the gendered body in space.

Gallery Talk on Tuesday October 10, 1pm at the Wexner Gallery

Link to article in the Lantern