Thursday, March 31, 6:00 p.m.
The videos of Dani and Sheilah ReStack are radical explorations of queer desire, parenthood, and creative community. Formally and emotionally adjacent to their domestic lives, the Restacks’ works are exhilarating montages of home, artmaking, sex, parenting, wounds, viscera, animals, gardens, and wild open spaces. The two will present the Chicago premiere of their feral domesticity trilogy, including Strangely Ordinary this Devotion (2017), Come Coyote (2019), and the recently completed Future From Inside (2021), which brings together body doubles, animal synthesis, and expansive notions of family, all refracted through the beauty, cruelty, and promise of life.
2017–21, USA, ca. 58 minutes plus discussion
Digital video
In English
Videos courtesy of Video Data Bank
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PROGRAM
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, 2017, 26 minutes
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. Dani and Sheilah ReStack collect and arrange images and moments that are at once peculiar and banal, precious and disturbing, creating resonance and contrast through experimental modes of storytelling.
Come Coyote, 2019, 8 minutes
“The second in a trilogy of films about desire and domesticity, Come Coyote examines issues around queer reproduction, intimacy, and motherhood. Collaborators and partners Dani and Sheilah ReStack capture in fleeting, diaristic images the tender and terrifying feelings they have around ushering new life into the world, conveyed with both humor and a powerful immediacy.” — Projections at NYFF, 2019 catalogue
“A quixotic intimate portrait, Come Coyote portrays the reproductive challenges of same-sex couples with sensual poetry and humor, plus a pinch of despair.” — Ela Bittencourt, Hyperallergic, October 2019
Future From Inside, 2021, 19 minutes
Future From Inside is the last in the trilogy begun in 2016, by Dani and Sheilah ReStack. The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work. The video 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.
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ABOUT
Dani and Sheilah ReStack have collaborated together since 2015. Their collaborative projects have shown at the 2017 Whitney Biennial; Iceberg Projects, Chicago; Toronto International Film Festival; Images Festival, Toronto; Lyric Theater, Carrizozo, New Mexico Leslie-Lohman Project Space, New York; Gaa Gallery, Wellfleet, Massachusetts; New York Film Festival; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. They have received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, and Visual Studies Workshop and have held residencies at The Headlands in Marin County and the MacDowell Colony. Both artists have established individual careers. Sheilah received her bachelor of fine arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and master of fine arts from Goldsmiths College, London. She is an associate professor and chair of studio art at Denison University. Dani received her master of fine arts in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003 and a master of fine arts in film/video from Bard College in 2009. She is an associate professor of drawing at Ohio State University.