Sheilah ReStack
Hold Hold Spill
July 17 - August 23, 2020
@
Interface
Oakland, CA
Interface is pleased to present Sheilah ReStack’s exhibition, Hold Hold Spill, opening July 17th through August 23rd. Using performative, camera-less and sculptural approaches to photography, ReStack explores the complexity of her relationship to place, domestic alterity, motherhood and queer desire.
The exhibition includes a series of ReStack’s walking prints, made by attaching photo paper to her feet as she navigates between her professional, personal and domestic life—as lover, artist, teacher, friend, mother. These prints are developed in the dark room and pieced together as an index of this navigation through time, space and social roles. Explored during the artist’s residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in 2016, the prints have taken on dimensional form as ReStack invents ways of collaging and pressing into and against other materials. The walking prints function as ground for adding materials from registers of daily life, held through pressure of rubber bands and plexiglass.
Also included in the exhibition are photograms made by pressing the artist’s body and that of her loved ones against photographic paper and exposing under the light of an enlarger. The images capture the specificity of physical connection in an abstracted version of real time. As with the walking prints, the photograph serves as a starting point for addition of other materials -- ultimately forming a lexicon of value that is additive, complete only when held in a precarious balance.
Collectively, this exhibition reflects a feminist inquiry into the possibility of an embodied photograph. As ReStack writes, “What results is of the photograph, but also something more unknowable. It holds a form; with shards of recognition and specificity. It is my attempt to build something that can be as precarious and tentative as the multivalent self in relation to another.”
A series of writings responding to the work will be released over the duration of the exhibition as part of the gallery’s Creative Engagements series. In a time of limited social contact due to Covid 19, the writings are offered as a strategy for connection around the work and the themes it explores, providing points of access, reflection, and even intimacy, from afar. Participating writers include: Elena Gross, Anna Lee, Dionne Lee, Leeza Meksin, Eileen Myles, Em Rooney, and Jo-Ey Tang. The writings are available on the gallery website. (www.interfaceartgallery.com)
