“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
2024
Susan's Sword
Feral Domestic
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
I AM THE FIRST LESBIAN I EVER MET
I AM THE FIRST LESBIAN I EVER MET (IATFLIEM) was commissioned by Intermedia Art Institute (IMAI) Düsseldorf for the public program, Circulating Copies 2023-2024. The work was inspired by a visit to an old age facility and conversation with queer employees and residents during a site visit in November 2023. IATFLIEM uses portraits of queer and lesbian elders in the Düsseldorf and surrounding area, interspersed with footage of Ohio lesbian elders (Older Lesbians Organizing for Change Columbus chapter), blue water and smoke as we attempt to craft a spell that will connect us to our elders and make visible existence as gendered woman, queer, old. Curator Nele Kaczmarek states, “In the work created for Circulating Copies, Dani and Sheilah ReStack have expanded their sphere of activity. Following discussions with local initiatives, the artists got to know a number of queer and lesbian senior citizens in Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Ohio, whom they then portrayed in video sequences. Prominently presented on the façade of Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and several info screens throughout the city, I AM THE FIRST LESBIAN I EVER MET presents queer ancestors whose commitment and activism have paved the way for future generations, even though they are still underrepresented in public space and discourse.”
With thanks to everyone involved in the videos, Claudia Büchels, Eva Bunjy, Pam Jackson, Rosie Prince, Julia Scher, Margarete Schleicher, and Dorte Kretschmar, whose commitment made the project possible.
