Line as Real as Broken
an exhibition of work by
Dani and Sheilah ReStack
Opening Reception Wednesday, June 3 | 6:00 - 9:00 PM
WUFF is thrilled to present an exhibition of work by acclaimed media artists Dani and Sheilah ReStack, at C'Cap: Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices.
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 Sheilah 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.
Dani and Sheilah will be presenting a segment of their latest work in progress film, Stovepipe to the Sun. The film combines research into a 19th century separatist women's community in Belton, Texas, and speculative filmmaking, as the ReStack’s cast themselves and friends as present-day descendants of the Sanctified Sisters. Interwoven into the research and narrative is autobiographical recording of their domestic life, as they struggle to raise their teenage daughter in our patriarchal society.
The Sanctified Sisters provide an intriguing crack in history – a women’s religious colony, begun in 1870, existing inside (and outside) of the patriarchal and gendered world of Texas. The group’s founder was making biscuits in the kitchen when she felt summoned to gather a group of women who would separate from the established church and do things their own way. The claiming of domestic space as a potential for inspiration and possibility is part of the ReStack’s idea of feral domestic – a commitment to
defamiliarizing the domestic sphere to explore the possibility of movement within spaces that are historically considered uninteresting, closed down, and, unsurprisingly, gendered female. In this work they offer us a world fragmented formally, and through its pull on past and present and imagine it to be a place to imagine a queer, feminist, alternative while simultaneously being alive to the lived reality.
One of the important facets that drew the ReStack’s to study this group of women was their unfailing reliance on dreams as a form of decision making. To honour this process there are several dream sequences that will later become part of the larger piece, Stovepipe to the Sun, running as single channel loops on monitors in the upper gallery.
Also included are the ReStack’s individual responses to dreams as they intersect with daily life – as symbol, form and question. Dani’s drawing and Sheilah’s photography practice are used as strands in the deconstruction and construction of forms to give meaning – seen here in a continuation of a previous project, Etel’s Up Trap. Photographs of daily life, combined with drawings, sewing and painted contributions of their young daughter, Sky, yield collaborative documents that pull from the real and the imagined. These works are pulled from the fabric of the everyday, as this can be used to make holes that let in the dream, the moon, the Line as Broken as Real.
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WUFF will also screen Dani and Sheilah's video trilogy Feral Domestic, on Sunday, June 7, at the Dave Barber Cinematheque. Three videos – Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017), Come Coyote (2019) and Future From Inside (2021) – marking 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.