Western Front presented an exhibition by Dani and Sheilah ReStack, who use video, drawing, and photography to contemplate queer desire, family, and collaboration in a time of planetary crisis.
The exhibition featured a multi-channel installation of the video trilogy Feral Domestic (2017–22) and three artist books of drawings, writings, and images related to each work, which together document the artists’ ongoing interest in the domestic as a space of creative possibility.
Composed of the videos Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017), Come Coyote (2019), and Future From Inside (2022), the Feral Domestic trilogy traverses a seven year period in the ReStacks’ relationship as it materializes in their life and work, and intersects with questions of motherhood and reproduction.
Assembled from fragments of documentary footage, and fictional and restaged scenes with family and friends, each work moves dynamically between moments of conflict, desire, communion, joy, and the everyday. This emotional range is coupled with an attention to the natural world and the expressive potentials of colour, sound, movement, and materials—which are repeatedly cut, submerged, spilled, stitched, and buried—to provide proposals for reshaping current conventions towards new possibilities. Photographs of installation courtesy of Dennis.
Shameless Light, a reading of love letters by queer and non binary women was performed on the closing night of the show. Letters were read aloud under red neon lights as a gesture of creating space for queer love as an unruly and generative act. Thank you to letter writers: Randy Lee Cutler, Amber Dawn, Sidney Gordon, Ogheneofegor Obuwoma, Jen Sungshine and Valérie d. Walker. Photographs of performance courtesy of Rachel Topham photography.
Essay by Jac Renée Bruneau Stack of and For the ReStacks
