2023

A Provisional Red

Series of photographic images printed on felt, collaged onto over a period of months and then held in plexiglass and secured with copper pins. Excerpts from this series commissioned by Camden Arts Center, London UK and curated into Wake Sleep Dream at Beeler Gallery, Columbus, OH. With fabrication assistance from Taylor Ross.

From the artist, “I have always been curious about how to re-direct and refuse the singularity of the photographic image. These works investigate the multiple possibilities of relation, and how that can be translated through photography. The photographs in this series were shot on 35 mm film in the summer of 2022, and include documentary images of horses, lovers, children, walks, houses across the street, kitchen tables, etc. The rolls of film held all these events equally as latent image, and they were later developed and translated to the double sided felt printed photographs that balance on concrete wedges. The photograph becomes a site for the accrual of marks made by thread, clothing, chalk, graphite. The viewer looks from multiple perspectives at the structure to try to understand how to make a whole. It is a fragile balance of materials with lines of viewing in and out of the structures that hold us -- skin, houses, rooms, relations. Looking is a way of being held.”

With thanks to the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence in Photography Award for supporting fabrication of this work.

Shameless Light

Shameless Light is an ongoing performance that invites lesbian and queer identified women and non-binary people to read love letters they have written, under red neon lights. Shameless Light was begun in 2016 in Carizzozo, New Mexico after the US election. Since then, letters have been written, and read, by community members at the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH, Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, Leslie Lohman Project Space in NY, Athena Grand, Athens, OH, TCU Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Texas and UIC, Chicago, IL.

Shameless Light privileges love as a generative, unruly and potentially radical act.  Shameless Light was installed in the street facing window of Mimosa House gallery in January 2023, and simultaneously installed at Camden Arts Centre café. We would like to thank the London letter writers who so generously wrote to love, desire, community under the red, neon funnel of light. Link to video document of letters here. This work was commissioned by Camden Arts Center.

Gabriela Cala-Lesina
Christa Holka
bones tan jones
Fa-Zah Raha
Mary W

Cuts in the Day

Cuts in the Day is the first institutional exhibition in the UK by Dani and Sheilah ReStack (b. 1972, Columbus, Ohio; b.1975, Caribou River, Nova Scotia). Produced especially for Camden Art Centre, it expands and develops the artists’ exploration of queer desire, family, climate crisis, and collaboration.

Using video, drawing and photography, the ReStacks push on the constraints of the domestic in order to yield transformation. Employing materials ranging from charcoal, felt, fur and thread, to angle iron, concrete, neon and wood, they create friction and precarity, constructing new feminist hierarchies of sense and order.

Drawing on Forrest Bess’ search for transcendence of body and mind through both painting and reconfigured corporeality, the ReStacks’ embarked on a journey to the waters of Ohio. Theirs was an attempt to communicate with Bess’ life and decision to live as artist and fisherperson in the small, rural community of Chinquapin on the Bay of Texas. The ReStacks’ attempts at communion culminates in a new video installation, Blood and Water for FCB where they draw on domestic objects, remnants of Colleen Collins’ poem In Extremis We, and recitation of women warrior names from Monique Wittig’s seminal feminist text Les Guérillères, written in 1969.

The exhibition also includes drawings by Dani and sculptural photographic works by Sheilah. In the drawings, Dani makes marks that express her commitment to Sheilah and love for their daughters. For Sheilah, her works are a way to make precarious documents out of encounter with domestic space and negotiation of identities and materials.

A presentation of the artists’ collaborative video trilogy, Feral Domestic, screens alongside the exhibition in the Reading Room. Blurring the line between the banal, the sublime, artifice and honesty, it travels the terrain of the ReStacks’ early relationship until the present day. It is filled with disagreements and compromises within family, collaboration, desire, joy and disappointment. Shot amidst the boulders of Utah, glaciers in Newfoundland, and the alleyway of their Ohio home, they activate environment as collaborator in their lesbian fantasy; set against the hegemonic culture that dominates public and private life.  Each film reminds us that in our collective conventions—sex as strictly private; family as heteronormative; motherhood as beatific; artmaking as singular— we are all complicit in mythologies of heteropatriarchal white supremacy. Feral Domestic is a collective and collaborative effort to dismantle and offer new proposals.

The ReStacks’ work speaks to a desire for connection, relation, autonomy and pleasure, as it is found within the mess of daily life. Cuts in the Day is an intimacy emergent—a love-story that celebrates and questions what it means to be a queer family in contemporary society.

Accompanying the exhibition is a free artwork by poet and musician, Colleen Collins, available in the Central Space. Commissioned by Dani and Sheilah ReStack, it is an attempt to make language for this visual experience.

Cuts in the Day at Camden Arts Centre

In Extremis We by Colleen Collins

If a Bear Knocks on the Door by Maggie Nelson.

Conversation with Daria Khan (Mimosa House Gallery) for Camden Arts Center.