Dani & Sheilah ReStack

Collaborators Dani (Leventhal) ReStack and Sheilah (Wilson) ReStack live and work in Columbus, Ohio, creating experimental, photography-based multimedia installation and performance video works. They explore subjects such as the body, maternal and familial structures, animals, lesbian relationships, and the environment. With a non-linear, montage editing style, the ReStacks’ films offer perspectives from their own gazes. Some of their most notable projects include Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017), A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted) (2017), Come Coyote (2019), and currently, Future From Inside (2021).

Sumin Choi: So first, how did you two kind of get started in filmmaking and installation work? And I guess how has your career kind of progressed through the years?

Dani: We met through the art community here in Columbus. It's definitely vibrant, but small, so we were seeing each other regularly at events, and then I fell for Sheilah. She was working on a daily writing/drawing piece called Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, and she wanted to make a ream of paper that had that text on it. So I told her I would silkscreen it for her. And then I became interested in that piece of language, and asked if I could write and draw on the paper too. That was beginning of working together.

Sumin: Oh, wow. Yeah, actually I watched Strangely Ordinary This Devotion and I thought that was really cool how it explores your relationship with each other. How would you say queerness and your relationship have influenced your work? How has it changed?

Sheilah: You know, your life becomes the work. The work kind of provides an alternative space to work our ideas out, like therapy or fantasy or other methods. Maybe we're in conflict, often we are, like part of being in relationship is being in conflict. And the work provides a really nice space because something is made out of the conflict, that's kind of interesting or beautiful, an unexpected way to use that energy towards material. So, the relationship influences the work, the relationship is the blood of the work and we are queer lovers, partners, and that is part of the reflected reality.

Sumin: You mentioned earlier, you share these very raw, intimate moments of your lives, what is that experience like?

Sheilah: I just didn't see any depictions of queerness, or like lesbianness or gayness when I was growing up. I'm from rural Nova Scotia, being gay was absolutely not ok there. So there's something really empowering to see oneself represented, especially if you know that at one point you were seen as ‘unrepresentable’. I think that's really important, to be able to see the things that you wish that you could see of your own reality, because in seeing them, it proves that they/you exist.

Dani: Vulnerability is brave, and the artists that are willing to work with emotion, where something is truly at stake, that’s the work I want to see.

Sheilah: Feeling is emotional knowledge, emotional logic, like the capacity to tell a story through non-traditional methods, different kinds of feeling is all part of that narrative.

Sumin: Right. So most of your films, you have footage from very different places, very different subjects, but then they're all put together very beautifully. What is your approach when it comes to filmmaking? Do you just film whatever looks cool and then put it together? Or do you kind of have a plan all along?

Dani: Definitely both. One of the great things about shooting with the phone is that the camera's around all the time. It's always in your pocket. You're out for a walk, all of a sudden you see this Canadian goose flying by, and you can just shoot it. And maybe there's no plan for that shot. But we archive it. And keep a little library of footage so that maybe at some point, we feel we need a bird, and we have one. Other times there's plans, it's usually when we are in the middle of editing and we realize we need something. Like a fight in the alley, so we go get fake blood from the party store. We get Sheilah's brother to shoot it with the drone. We practice and reshoot until we get a good take.

Sheilah: A lot of things are pulled from different registers, and some of them are hyper planned and some of them are somewhat planned, and some of them are not planned. You know- like the footage of me videoing Dani mopping the floor. She had no idea.

Dani: There's a shot in Future From Inside, I'm mopping the floor on my hands and knees, lo and behold, I step back and run into her while she's shooting, and it becomes a comedy.

Sheilah: Yeah, humor is really effective, too, to get at vulnerability, it's good to kind of recognize your own humanity. Maybe we're the only ones that think things are funny, I don't know if other people think it's funny. But there's a kind of like, you know, pathos, there's something funny about being alive in this world.

Dani: It's so tragic and difficult, you know?

Sheilah: Yeah. But in terms of the editing, that's the vulnerable part of it too, like how do you kind of mash all these things together and believe in cohesion that isn't relying on that highly recognizable narrative? So it relies on a different kind of logic, and what kind of logic is that? You'd have to trust your audience or trust your own senses that it is possible to pull things together through sound or movement.

Dani: And sometimes if I am showing work to an audience that doesn't have a lot of experience with experimental film, (because people always want to understand, it's human nature, you know), I suggest to watch it like a poem: allow things to come and go. You don't have to put it all together, and it might make sense later.

Sheilah: Or make sense of the feeling, too. I think that that's like, one of the things about poetry is that sometimes it's just a feeling, but we're often taught to mistrust feelings.

Sumin: Yeah, definitely. Can you talk a little bit about all the animals in the films and why you choose to include them?

Dani: We love them!

Sumin: Simple.

Dani: Yeah. So at one point, when I was growing up, I wanted to be a veterinarian, but science and mathematics and that whole world of study, there was nothing about it that really interested me except the animals. My brother hunted and he taught me how to skin animals. You can't really see a wild animal for very long before they run. So when they were dead, you can really look, and also do the dissection which, you know, for some people that's gross, everybody has a different threshold. Sometimes I would eat them if they were fresh, or make sculpture with the hides. So that was a whole world before I met Sheilah, before I lived urban. And then now, you know, we're in the woods when we can be, but for the most part it's like the Discovery Channel or something, I want to get my owl fix or something.

Sumin: You're currently working on Future From Inside, tell me a little bit about that project.

Dani: Future From Inside is the last video of the trilogy. We are near picture lock, we have one more scene to shoot. The trilogy was not the initial plan, but after we made Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, it felt unfinished, though, everything's unfinished, right?

Sheilah: It's later in time, they all come from a particular time, so Strangely Ordinary This Devotion was from 2015 to 2016, Come Coyote 2018 and Future From Inside 2021. They're fantasies with stories of different characters and themes... but they also are our relationship over time. All three are about what it means to be in a family, and what it means to work.

Dani: And what it means to survive climate disaster. In Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, we use magic, to make children who can live without water. In Future From Inside, we cast spells for children to make kin with animals so they can survive the future. Then, there's also the unfolding story about Sheilah's desire to have another baby. That story continues to unravel and there's a grieving in Future From Inside that wasn't there in Come Coyote.

Sumin: Yeah, speaking of, watching your films through the years, it's like watching your daughter grow up. How has she and motherhood in general impacted your filmmaking?

Sheilah: Dani met Rose when she was three or four. One of the things that both of us have remarked about Rose , even to this day, at 10 and a half, is her ability and need to escape into fantasy. For instance, she is handed a Kleenex to blow her nose and immediately it is a part of the story she’s spinning in her mind, it happens in the space of a second, she transforms banal objects into fantasy objects.. That has been instructional for us, the ability to just flip so fast, like a jump cut.

Dani: Yeah, all of a sudden, the tissue is a magic, flying carpet and we're off! And that's inspiring. I find that to be one of the magic powers of children that get lost if you're not careful.

Sheilah: Yeah, and I think that motherhood is really hard to make work about. Because it's easy for it to be perceived as being cliche, or there's a fear of cliche. In the art world, it's historically been something that's not cool to make work about. There's all kinds of identity work that is smiled upon, but motherhood hasn't fallen into the category of any of those. And I think that's probably different at this point, to some degree, but I think that there's also real restrictions on the decision to have children. It changes your life and that's why this idea of the feral domestic came forward. You have less capacity to leave your domestic when you have a child, you can't just decide that you want to go out and shoot something. Because you're responsible to another human who is possibly sleeping. So you have to get creative about how to continue making work, staying home and working while being a parent. She's actually part of the work too. And we always get ethical questions about including her in the work.

Dani: Look, if you grew up with parents who were farmers there's no question: you're out in the fields, you're gonna be weeding, you're gonna be mucking stalls. For Rose, in our family, she has to participate in the shoot.

Sumin: Exactly.

Dani: It's a beautiful way to live. I mean, she will become her own being and do what she wants. But right now, this is the condition.

Sheilah: Yeah, I mean it's different because her image goes out into the world, however small the distribution may be, and that idea of a child being somehow this innocent that should be protected. But that's such a hypocritical lie in a way, it's like, oh, you only want the images of children that are put forward by the hetero patriarchal society to disseminate? That doesn't feel right to me. This just feels like an area where we could try something else. Like here's something else to offer in that narrative. And if you say it's not allowed, you're basically canceling the voice of all of those parents, who, this is their life and their world that doesn’t fit the norm -- I feel like it deserves a little bit more attention.

Sumin: Yeah, definitely! Lastly, what advice would you give to any aspiring or future filmmakers? Particularly, in the experimental domain?

Dani: Are you a filmmaker?

Sumin: I'm kind of, trying to be, I am a film major. We will see.

Dani: First of all, question your motives, and then once you have clarity just go forth, as fearlessly as you can. Also, let yourself go on tangents, don’t get fixed on an outcome that you think you want. Because if you allow for the unpredictable, you might discover even better.

Sheilah: I agree, be as fearless as you can. There will be so many things, so many rejections, so many people who are going to be critical. First of all, kill as many of those critical voices as you can that are within yourself. But then have the courage to keep going, and the belief, the resilience to keep going.

About the Interviewer:

Sumin Choi is in her final year at UC Davis pursing an A.B. in Cinema & Digital Media and A.B. Psychology. She spends her time in Davis and Los Angeles creating photography and video work. This interview was conducted on January 31, 2021.