Mills Folly Microcinema – Isthmus

press release: Mills Folly Microcinema presents the Feral Domestic trilogy by Dani and Sheilah ReStack

Join us for an evening of contemporary video art on Thursday, September 29 at 7:00 p.m. (Please note the return to our normal start time.) Admission $5.00, free for ALL members. Seating is limited, and doors open at 7:30 p.m. A $1 fee will be added for single admission credit card charges, but no fee for multiple admissions ($10 or more).

Gathered together under the title Feral Domestic, these three videos – Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017), Come Coyote (2019), and Future From Inside (2021) – are a marker of time, queer desire, family, place, relation and conflict. Using both documentary and fictional footage from their lives, Dani and Sheilah ReStack forge fragmented possibility inside a world that often feels broken.

The works are a continued collaborative attempt to find resolution through connection – using form, color, sound, children, and artmaking as narrative through lines that propose the domestic as a place of unexpected catalyst and re-invention. Descriptions by Video Data Bank, Chicago.

Read Dani and Sheilah ReStack interviewed by Genevieve Yue in the June 16, 2022 edition of The Film Comment Letter.

Strangely Ordinary This Devotion | Dani Leventhal ReStack, Sheilah ReStack | USA | 2017 | 27 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 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. Premiered at the 2017 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial.

“An intensely open film of private ritual and wonder.” -Phil Coldiron, Brooklyn Rail.

Come Coyote | Dani Leventhal ReStack, Sheilah ReStack | USA | 2019 | 8 minutes 

“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 New York Film Festival, 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

Future From Inside | Dani Leventhal ReStack, Sheilah ReStack | USA | 2021 | 19 minutes 

Future From Inside is the last in the Feral Domestic trilogy. The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work. The porous line between real and fantasy is further elaborated in this video — FFI 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.

“It is not enough to say that Dani and Sheilah ReStack make artistic home movies; for them, there is no separation between art and domestic life. But this is no Neverland, no matter how idyllic their romps in Midwestern fields may appear. For women, utopia must be grounded in the concrete, with full awareness of the multiple and often conflicting roles they inhabit. Amid these contradictions, the Feral Domestic films show how the home can nurture a sense of vibrant possibility in an increasingly narrow and uninhabitable world.”

-Genevieve Yue, The Film Comment Letter

Dani ReStack website: https://danirestack.com/

Dani ReStack is an associate professor of art at Ohio State University. In 2009 she received an MFA in film/video from Bard College, and in 2003, an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has screened her single-channel videos at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, PS1, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Lincoln Center, and Anthology Film Archives, among others. Her single channel videos were included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. ReStack is a recipient of the UnionDocs UNDO fellowship, Kazuko Trust Award, a Wexner Center Film/Video Residency, the Milton Avery Fine Arts Fellowship, and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice Visual Arts Grant. Her experimental videos have been purchased by Vassar College, Mills College of Art, Light Works, The University of Buffalo, and NYU. Her drawings are included in the permanent collection of MoMA.

Sheila ReStack website: https://www.sheilahwilsonrestack.com/

Sheilah Wilson ReStack was born and raised in Caribou River, Nova Scotia and is currently Associate Professor Photography at Denison University. She has BFA from NSCAD University and MFA from Goldmiths College. Most recently she has been working on projects analyzing the traces between history, story and the land. She uses photography, video, and text as performative and documentary tools to pick through the seams of narrative and image.

ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA

Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at Project Projection events.

Mills Folly Microcinema is funded in part by grants from Dane Arts and the Madison Arts Commission, with additional funds from the Wisconsin Arts Board.