Cuts in the Day

Using video, drawing and photography, the ReStacks push on the constraints of the domestic in order to yield transformation. Employing materials ranging from charcoal, felt, fur and thread, to angle iron, concrete, neon and wood, they create friction and precarity, constructing new feminist hierarchies of sense and order.

Drawing on Forrest Bess’ search for transcendence of body and mind through both painting and reconfigured corporeality, the ReStacks’ embarked on a journey to the waters of Ohio. Theirs was an attempt to communicate with Bess’ life and decision to live as artist and fisherperson in the small, rural community of Chinquapin on the Bay of Texas. The ReStacks’ attempts at communion culminates in a new video installation, Blood and Water for FCB where they draw on domestic objects, remnants of Colleen Collins’ poem In Extremis We, and recitation of women warrior names from Monique Wittig’s seminal feminist text Les Guérillères, written in 1969.

The exhibition also includes drawings by Dani and sculptural photographic works by Sheilah. In the drawings, Dani makes marks that express her commitment to Sheilah and love for their daughters. For Sheilah, her works are a way to make precarious documents out of encounter with domestic space and negotiation of identities and materials.