An Evening of Feral Domesticity with the ReStacks

Collaborators and partners Dani and Sheilah ReStack’s trilogy of films beginning with Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017) is a radical and intimate exploration of queer family and motherhood. The ReStacks have embarked on an artistic collaboration that is formally and emotionally intertwined with their domestic lives, which they share with their daughter Rose. Cinema Scope’s Michael Sicinski described SOTD as “A domestic mini-epic capacious enough to include witches in the heartland, the painterly use of blood or blood substitutes, Chantal Akerman and Prince, the oral application of smooth stones, gardens and mesas, the draining of a sebaceous cyst, and the enthusiastic eating of pussy. It is very possibly the film of the year.”

Sheilah and Dani's imagery is culled from documentary footage of their domestic lives and beyond. A porous border flickers between the banalities of quotidian life and the realm of fantasy. The logistics and technology of queer reproduction is a central theme of Come Coyote, the second film in the trilogy. Future From Inside, the final work in the trilogy, began production in 2016. The film traces the ReStack collaboration as it manifests in life and work. FFI weaves together body doubles, animal synthesis, queer desire, children and radical community to construct a fragmented future.

Screening courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dani and Sheilah ReStack’s films have screened at the Whitney Biennial (2017), the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Gene Siskel Film Center, MOMA PS1, Oberhausen, Cine Cycle, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Union Docs and VIEWS of the Avant Guard and Anthology Film Archives.

Sheilah received her BFA from NSCAD University, Halifax and MFA from Goldmiths College, London. She is Associate Professor and Chair of Studio Art at Denison University. Dani received her MFA in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003 and an MFA in Film/Video from Bard College in 2009. She is Associate Professor of Drawing at Ohio State University.

Event Venue

Dreamsong, 1237 4th Street Northeast, Minneapolis, United States