This video work by Dani and Sheilah ReStack pulls the experience of becoming mother (both through fostering and bio) through the lens of personal lives that are always, also, steeped in a world where systemic racism, classism and heteronormativity influence and shape. Using documentary footage, a journey into a cave, a dream recounted and formal strategies of color, sound and movement the ReStack’s push experiences and ideas together to see what can yield or reveal. The Sky’s In There proposes a fragmented meditation on the capacity of relation to bring about transformation. Duration 11:24, 2022. Available for rental or purchase through Video Data Bank.
2022
Control is Cassandra
Control is Cassandra gets its title from an essay by Ann Carson, “Cassandra Float Can.” The title figure, Cassandra is a priestess in Greek Mythology, cursed to utter prophecies that are always true but never believed. In this curious position ReStack places “control”. Throughout her work, ReStack explores the way her identities—mother, lover, artist, friend—are filled with the anxiety and wonder of being (and not being) in control of connection and outcome.
She writes: “I see my work as a way to hold things down. As a way to place materials in a particular relation to achieve the control I desire. I am faced with the refusal of the material to act as I wish—the stitch that doesn’t take, the leather that won’t hold, the writing erased. These material lags and refusals correspond to the refusals of my pre-teen daughter; the pull of my lover; the needs of the young child we are fostering; and the strain of living in a world that holds inequities and erasures...”
In Control is Cassandra each of these facets of ReStack’s life inform new photo-based sculptures, as well as a project using polaroids as an attempt to document through opacity. Combining materials from many registers—rubber bands, concrete, plastics, clothing, fur, gold leaf and a wide range of photographic materials—ReStack constructs pieces that viscerally incorporate risk, tension and fragility as metaphors for the many other kinds of precarity in our lives.
Brought together for the first time at The Blue Building Gallery, ReStack’s works in Control is Cassandra invite viewers into a sense of instability but strive toward balance. They embody the tension between the feral and the domestic; motherhood and queer sexulaity; the softness of intimate bodies and the hardness of the world built around them.
Director TBB Emily Falencki, and Ryan Josey
To Draw the Sky before the Ground
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
