2021

Future From Inside

still from Future From Inside, 2021

Future From Inside | Dani Leventhal ReStack, Sheilah ReStack | USA | 2021 | 19 minutes 

Future From Inside is the last in the Feral Domestic trilogy. The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work. The porous line between real and fantasy is further elaborated in this video — FFI utilizes body doubles, a continuing journey for answers and oracles, animal synthesis, queer desire, children and radical community to weave a fragmented future. This final offering of the trilogy does not offer answers to the personal and societal conflict, but continues the possibility of the feral domestic as a way to inhabit the space of living to yield surprising results.

“It is not enough to say that Dani and Sheilah ReStack make artistic home movies; for them, there is no separation between art and domestic life. But this is no Neverland, no matter how idyllic their romps in Midwestern fields may appear. For women, utopia must be grounded in the concrete, with full awareness of the multiple and often conflicting roles they inhabit. Amid these contradictions, the Feral Domestic films show how the home can nurture a sense of vibrant possibility in an increasingly narrow and uninhabitable world.”


-Genevieve Yue, The Film Comment Letter

Shameless Light

Shameless Light, a continuing project of love letters by womxn identified queers. Project began in 2016. In Fort Worth, Texas, we were able to make contact with queers who either grew up in, or currently lived in, Fort Worth. The love letters were recorded and projected onto the exterior of the Fine Arts buildings on the TCU campus. This projection event was in conjunction with the show, Stack for Martha’s Sisters at the TCU Contemporary. Both the show and the performance allowed ways of imprinting queer love by placing the queer body in space — making ephemeral declaration through existence, through language, through light, through feeling.

Shameless Light was projected on October 20, 2021 and we offer thanks to letter writers Sharon Herrera, Bee Grey, Ivy Thistler, Maura Guardiola and Kim Nguyen.

Stack for Martha's Sisters

Stack for Martha’s Sisters is a commissioned work for Fort Worth Contemporary Arts TCU, Fort Worth, Texas consisting of 3 projection installations and a broadside takeaway. The show ran from September 10-October 30, 2021. Stack for Martha’s Sisters is a queer feminist imagining of alternative spaces of being, family and creation. The video installations are intended as portals of fragmented imagination — accessible through contemplation of past women’s communities, and channeling a horizontal possibility of influence, history and making. For the artists, Dani and Sheilah ReStack, the Sanctified Sisters of Belton, Texas were a major inspiration in making the work. The Sanctified Sisters was founded by Martha McWhirter in the late 1860s, after she had a dream in the kitchen of separating from her husband and making community with women similarly interested in leaving their husbands, and pursuing an alternative lifestyle. The history of the Sanctified Sisters infuses the installation at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts as the artists used this historical legend, which exists without physical trace except for a plaque in the town of Belton, as catalyst.

The artists returned to their home state of Ohio after a site visit in June, 2021, and visited the Susan B Anthony Womyns Land in Athens, Ohio. The Susan B. Anthony Land was founded in the 1990’s and continues to serve an intentional queer population interested in living or camping rurally. The filming for Stack for Martha’s Sisters occurred in the outdoor kitchen, and Star cabin, at the Susan B. Anthony Memorial Land (Subamuh) in summer of 2021. The artists, Dani + Sheilah, and their children are part of the creation and interaction with the space of stacking, feral domestic possibility and alternative queer family collaboration. 

Alongside Stack for Martha’s Sisters the artists also present Shameless Light at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts. This is an ongoing project where invited queer identified participants submit love letters that are then read aloud under two red, neon funnels. At TCU, the artists are hosting an outdoor screening of Fort Worth queer identified womxn reading love letters on October 20, 2021.

Install images courtesy TCU Gallery Director Lynné Bowman Cravens and Brad Flowers. Video of installation.

Three Gestures

How is a photograph a breath?

The holding together is a breath.

I want to use balance and precarity together in the skin of the photograph. I want to see the photographic document made vast--capacious enough to hold materials pulled from various registers of the world—refusing 2 dimensionality.

Photographic documents can be generated by:

1. Placing photo paper on feet for the duration of a day, then developing them in the darkroom.

2. Printing photos on felted fleece, becoming material warmth: a blanket, a texture, a touch.

3. Placing into a precarious balance -- held with rubber bands, plexi, copper piercings, angle iron, rocks. Angle iron touches plexi; plexi magnifies the photographic paper; the photographic paper holds a letter to my daughter.

The resulting balance is an abstraction; it is a construction. Image pushed together through my touch deciding the relation, placed on a wedge, pulled out and held with a rock. The resulting works call out to the body of the viewer. One must move around the image to see it, a photograph in fragments of dimensionality and relation.

The work -- and its subjects -- and its participants -- an exhaled balance with time, environment, material.