Feral Domestic

Description:

Feral Domestic was 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.

Strangely Ordinary this Devotion and Future from Inside were projected on the gallery walls, while Come Coyote was projected on a futon mattress owned by Western Front founders Martin Bartlett, followed by Eric Metcalfe. The trilogy screened every hour on the hour during gallery visiting times, and ran for a total of fifty-three minutes. 

To close the exhibition, an iteration of the artists’ ongoing performance Shameless Light (2016—) was presented in the Western Front office. For the performance, queer identified women and non-binary community members were invited to write love letters, which they read aloud under red neon lights to create space for queer love as an unruly and generative act. Readings by Randy Lee Cutler, Amber Dawn, Sidney Gordon, Jen Sungshine, Fegor Obuwoma, and Valérie Walker were followed by a conversation with the ReStacks and Western Front executive director Susan Gibb.

The exhibition also marked the commencement of the ReStacks’ participation in Western Front’s artists-in-residence program. During their residency, the ReStacks further developed a feature length video, Stovepipe to the Sun.

Curated by Susan Gibb.

Documents:

• “STACK OF AND FOR THE RESTACKS” (2024). Essay by Jac Renée Bruneau.