In a continuation of their collaborative installation practice, Dani and Sheilah ReStack have created a site specific installation at Haus zur Liebe in Switzerland. This installation furthers their practice of expanding dialogue between historical and contemporary occupation of space by queer, desiring, domestic, gendered and familial bodies. For this installation, the artists are in conversation with the previous usage of the space as an art atelier for children (1970s to 2010s) that operated using the philosophy of Arno Stern. The title, To Draw the Sky before the Ground, is in reference to his acknowledgement, and support, of the order in which children organize space while painting.
In the first room the artists recorded their family, stacked together in their studio in Columbus, Ohio. They form an indeterminate mass of daughter, mother, artist, lover. The re-staging of domestic and creative space in the Haus zur Liebe becomes a set made of materials ranging from cardboard to balsa, charcoal, chalk, wigs, mesh and other materials pulled from artistic and domestic registers. An accompanying soundtrack of a list poem composed of children's descriptions of Rhoda Kellog’s line drawing catalog is heard in the space. Rhoda Kellog was a psychologist, children arts researcher, and proponent of the necessary free form of children’s art making, much in the same way as Arno Stern.
In the back room the artists have installed the second in their trilogy of video works, Feral Domestic. Come Coyote (2020) continues the fragmented curiosity for experimental narrative and meaning through making – all while using their relationship, family and creative life and conflicts as generative catalyst.
Link to video of installation.
Excerpt form List Poem of Childrens Interpretations of Rhoda Kellog’s Line Catalog
Single Crossed Circle
Multiple Loop Line
Undifferentiated Line
Girl Laying down Line
Looks like snow, looks like eyes and a boomerang
Spiral Line
Looks like before I could say your name. Looks like outside when it is too bright to tell where things are.
Roving Enclosing Line
Looks like a pie, looks like wings
and inside the wings a beach with the foam on top of the waves
Spiral Line
Multiple Circular Line
Multiple Diagonal Line
Line for keeping
Looks like a rag towel
A rag
Zigzag or waving line
