Professor ReStack’s work in the Hold Hold Spill exhibition
Professor ReStack’s photographic work at gallery in Oakland, CA July 17-August 17, 2020. The exhibition included 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 were 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 reflected 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.”
The show was written about by alumni Verena Thomson ‘20 a Studio Art minor with concentration in photography. The writing can be seen in the online publication Hundred Heroines. Thomson states in the article, “As a professor, Sheilah Restack encourages her students to be courageous in their work; to show vulnerability, an idea which has certainly translated into her own work. Her latest exhibition, Hold Hold Spill, is a reminder of the old, but ever loved snapshots which we hold in our wallets. Folded and opened along the same creases time and time again, they are stored in our pockets, and carried with us as we go about our daily lives. This body of work serves as a comforting reminder that we are more than the roles and spaces we occupy; a tender and nostalgic reference to queer identity and motherhood.”
The works in the show were also responded to by Eileen Myles, Em Rooney, Jo-ey Tang, Anna Lee, Dionne Lee and Leeza Meksin.
