Cuts in the Day
Camden Arts Center, London, United Kingdom
30 Sep 2022/15 Jan 2023
If a Bear Knocks on the Door, File Note 143 by Maggie Nelson
Brooklyn Rail Conversation, Featuring ReStack and Amanda Gluibizzi, with sua yoo
“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.
A presentation of the artists’ collaborative video trilogy, Feral Domestic, screens alongside the exhibition in the Reading Room. Blurring the line between the banal, the sublime, artifice and honesty, it travels the terrain of the ReStacks’ early relationship until the present day. It is filled with disagreements and compromises within family, collaboration, desire, joy and disappointment. Shot amidst the boulders of Utah, glaciers in Newfoundland, and the alleyway of their Ohio home, they activate environment as collaborator in their lesbian fantasy; set against the hegemonic culture that dominates public and private life. Each film reminds us that in our collective conventions—sex as strictly private; family as heteronormative; motherhood as beatific; artmaking as singular— we are all complicit in mythologies of heteropatriarchal white supremacy. Feral Domestic is a collective and collaborative effort to dismantle and offer new proposals.
The ReStacks’ work speaks to a desire for connection, relation, autonomy and pleasure, as it is found within the mess of daily life. Cuts in the Day is an intimacy emergent—a love-story that celebrates and questions what it means to be a queer family in contemporary society.
Accompanying the exhibition is a free artwork by poet and musician, Colleen Collins, available in the Central Space. Commissioned by Dani and Sheilah ReStack, it is an attempt to make language for this visual experience.”
—press release from Camden Art Center
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In Extremis We
by Colleen Coco Collins
the taking of the readings has begun; the fount divination is omegic come. do not wrestle out of the jacket
of the last lesson of parch
it zips up
and you are in it and you are in it
and you are sat there in the bloom of slake and caught.
do not shrug out
of the mantle of quench
of the cloth of the last arid day
it draws up
and you are in it and you are in it
and you are sat there in the florid teaching weir-ed and lopped;
mind a sharpening strop for what whets across:
all is a dwindling harbour
all is duress garlanding up your leg.
the purchase of the knife was good but still:
a trenchant clatter;
a bad cut florescing nacre
from a source portending icor.
what jetsammed
falls in curls to what floor
what splayed in what lake
one of us lapping one of us back
one of us a purling wake one of us a shoulder
one of us tap
Charon is that you plunging your pole in and pushing off
coming this way
in the rippling now-dark
coming small churn come whelk
come ruse
come krill swarm grid taking vertical cues
i keep two wounds open to either side of my face i keep two—
wet finger in the vortex what presage you
Pherein Phonon debarks gingerly. the blenny nips deceptively.
glass barometer under tongue surges feverishly.
flotsam casket circles eddy. you leave in extremis we.
hic sunt ungoverned cuts.
hic sunt wave moving into blunt.
hic sunt imaginal cells bobbing into place. hic sunt windsock in-caved.
hic sunt a shored-up packing case. uncrate the Judas goat:
it leads the way.