“Susan’s Sword” is Sheilah ReStack’s second solo exhibition at The Blue Building Gallery (TBB). Sheilah’s work holds a very special place in our hearts. Sheilah was the first artist to install work at TBB as part of our debut group show, “Soft Launch” in February 2021. The following year, Sheilah had her first solo exhibition with TBB, “Control is Cassandra” in May 2022. Sheilah now returns with “Susan’s Sword” debuting three new, never-before-seen bodies of work. Each piece in “Susan’s Sword” extends ReStack’s long-term interest in experimental photography. ReStack has described this interest as a desire, “...to crawl inside the photograph, to rupture its decisive relation to time and truth.” In “Susan’s Sword” ReStack has mounted two large-scale installations of photograms that confront the viewer upon entry and use scale to evoke this feeling of being inside the medium. She has chosen to present these installations alongside, Etels Up Trap (2024) a new suite of intimate works on paper that collaboratively combine images from Sheilah’s daily life with painting and drawings by her partner Dani and their daughter Sky. Dani will you draw me the books falling (2024) is a new body of work presented as a full-wall installation of photograms. Dani will you draw me the books falling brings together the numbers Sheilah’s wife Dani runs in her head during episodes of mania; Sheilah’s 35 mm photographs and journal entries; and marks made by the ReStacks’ 4 year old daughter, Sky, who is interested in mark-making but is not yet making recognizable forms. Sheilah describes each of these elements as “escapes from recognizability” and “departures from the logic and order we often expect of books, language and our world.” She describes the installation itself as an “attempt to create a space governed by signifiers of meaning, that dissolves the meaning of those very same signifiers.” Desire Right (2024) is an immersive, fragmented poem written with photograms made from organic and domestic materials collected along the drive between Columbus and Halifax. Viewers may recognize some of these textures as local, seasonal plants—goldenrod, mayweed, haresfoot, witch hazel—and others as familiar objects—string, cords, reins. Sheilah describes the process of working in the darkroom as a struggle against the nature of the materials, “to make a line I must crack the bending stem and hope for legibility.” She describes the words formed themselves as, “an aspirational witchy spell holding the desire, anger and spill of queer family.” by Emily Falencki Director TBB and Ryan Josey Associate TBB
