Sheila ReStack, Hold, Hold, Spill

Introduction to this catalogue which included writing by Elena Gross, Anna Lee, Dionne Lee, Jo-ey Tang, Leeza Meskin, Eileen Myles, and Em Rooney, in response to her exhibition at Interface Gallery.

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
For where I am closed, I am false.
— Ranier Maria Rilke

Sheilah ReStack’s work is layered and unfolding. When I first encountered it, I was immediately drawn to its strong sculptural presence and evocative combination of images and materials. Intimate photographic records are collaged with and pressed into materials from daily life. They are stitched together, compressed under plexi-glass and bound by rubber bands, viscerally and poetically signifying the ways we piece together an identity and construct a life.

The works include tender photograms that ReStack makes by holding loved ones and pressing their bodies against photographic paper as they embrace under the light of an enlarger. They also include ReStack’s “walking prints,” which she makes by attaching photo paper to her feet, recording the contact of her body with the ground as she moves within and between social roles and the physical spaces of daily life. The walking prints seem to locate who we are in the shifting spaces between roles and social identities. They seem to ask, “What if all we are is a series of steps, moments, contact?”

Spending time with this work over the course of her exhibition at Interface, I became increasingly touched by its openness—the way it doesn’t attempt to assert a fixed identity, it includes the mundane, the in between and the precarious. A number of the works invite us to peek in from behind to discover a private notation, a personal photograph or a folded up letter.

I also deeply appreciate the way motherhood is included in this work. Photographs of Sheilah’s mother, her partner Dani’s grandmother, and of their daughter, Rose, evoke lineage, care, memory and loss.

The central sculpture in the exhibition, Hold House, contains a tapestry of the walking prints, notes from the artist’s studio, and a string of flowers made by Rose. These are all pressed between Plexiglas and precariously balanced against a steel brace and a sagging bag of water filled with decaying flowers.

We are all alive and dying like this. Sitting with this work leaves me grateful for the poignant reminder of my longing to unfold: to let it all spill and to hold it all.