Feral Domestic
a video trilogy by
Dani + Sheilah ReStack
Sunday, June 7 | 5:00 PM
Gathered together under the title Feral Domestic, three videos – Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017), Come Coyote (2019) and Future From Inside (2021) – are a marker of time, queer desire, family, place, relation and conflict. Using both documentary and fictional footage from their lives, the ReStack’s forge fragmented possibility inside a world that often feels broken.
The works are a continued collaborative attempt to find resolution through connection – using form, colour, sound, children, and artmaking as narrative through lines that propose the domestic as a place of unexpected catalyst and re-invention.
This program is rated 14A
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, dirs. Dani + Sheilah ReStack
2017 | USA | 27 | video
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family.
Come Coyote, dirs. Dani + Sheilah ReStack
2017 | USA | 7.5 | video
Come Coyote continues the investigation of environment, queer desire, motherhood, and collaboration. This 8-minute video brings together moments culled from our own life and fabricated scenes. One of the central themes in this chapter is the idea of reproduction and its implications – the reality/fantasy of both logistics and technology of queer reproduction, and the variations of our individual commitment.
Future From Inside, dirs. Dani + Sheilah ReStack
2021 | USA | 10 | video | Manitoban premiere
Future From Inside 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.
Filmmaker and visual artist Dani ReStack holds an MFA in both film and video from Bard College and in studio arts from the University of Illinois. She is an associate professor of drawing at the Ohio State University and her single-channel videos have screened at IFFR, Chicago Underground Film Festival and Union Docs, among others. Her drawings and videos are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Vassar, UIC, Earlham College and Yale University. ReStack describes the creation of her moving-image works as a process of “accumulation and excision.” She lives and works together with her partner Sheilah ReStack, with whom she forms a productive artistic collaboration.
Multimedia artist Sheila ReStack holds a BFA from NSCAD University and an MFA from Goldmiths College. She is currently associate professor of photography at Denison University. Restack has exhibited her work in Canada, USA, UK, New Zealand and Israel and has garnered several awards. Restack uses “photography, video, and text as performative and documentary tools to pick through the seams of narrative and image.” She lives and works together with her partner Dani ReStack, with whom she forms a productive artistic collaboration.