Interface is pleased to present Sheilah ReStack’s exhibition, Hold Hold Spill, opening July 17th through August 23rd. Using performative, camera-less and sculptural approaches to photography, ReStack explores the complexity of her relationship to place, domestic alterity, motherhood and queer desire.

The exhibition includes 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 are 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 reflects 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.”

A series of writings responding to the work will be released over the duration of the exhibition as part of the gallery’s Creative Engagements series. In a time of limited social contact due to Covid 19, the writings are offered as a strategy for connection around the work and the themes it explores, providing points of access, reflection, and even intimacy, from afar. Participating writers include: Elena Gross, Anna Lee, Dionne Lee, Leeza Meksin, Eileen Myles, Em Rooney, and Jo-Ey Tang. 

Sheilah ReStack has exhibited her work nationally in Canada and the US, as well as England, New Zealand and Israel. Awards include CBC Aural Recall winner (2002), Nova Scotia Talent Trust recipient (2002-4), Creative Capital Foundation Scholarship (2007), Canada Council Travel Grant (2008), Denison University Research Funding (2010, 2013), Banff Center thematic residency scholarship with Adam Chodzko (2011) and Canada Council Project Grant (2012, 2015). ReStack’s work has been commissioned for the Museum of Fine Arts of Santa Fe, Balloon Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, OSU Urban Art Spaces, W(here) festival in Pictou County, Columbia College Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, Ross Creek Center for the Arts, Confederation Arts Centre and others. ReStack was the winner of Judy Chicago’s Through the Flower Foundation ‘Feminists Under Forty’ competition in 2008, and her work continues to investigate the potential for feminism, empowerment, queer desire and images that propose new narrative structures.

Elena Gross is an independent writer and culture critic living in Oakland, CA. She specializes in representations of identity through fine art, photography, and popular media.

Anna Lee is a writer, scholar, and currently the William and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography at the Columbus Museum of Art. Recent essays examine scratches and dust on snapshots (False Lighthouse), and the significance of telling stories from de-centered places (forthcoming Radial Survey catalog).

Dionne Lee uses photography, collage, and video, to investigate ideas of power and racial histories in relation to the American landscape. Lee's work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including The New Orleans Museum of Art; the San Francisco Arts Commission; Interface Gallery, Oakland; Light Work, New York; and Aperture Foundation, New York. Lee was a finalist for the 2019 SFMoMA SECA Award and 2019 San Francisco Artadia Award. Her 2019 exhibition at Interface was Art Forum magazine’s Critic’s Pick. She currently teaches photography at Stanford University.

Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, textiles, public art, and multiples. Her work investigates parallels between the conventions of painting, architecture, and the human body. Meksin was born in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S. with her family in 1989. Her most recent large-scale public art installation is currently on view at deCorodva Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA.

Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist and art journalist. They are the author of 22 books including the forthcoming For Now, a talk/essay on writing from Yale Press. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Em Rooney (born 1983 in Bridgeport, CT) is a multimedia artist primarily working in sculpture and photography. Most recently she has exhibited bodies of work in Amsterdam at Fons Welters Gallery, in New York City at Bodega and The Museum of Modern Art as part of the exhibition Being: New Photography 2018. Her forthcoming solo show will open at Ghebaly in Los Angeles in December. She lives and works in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Jo-ey Tang can be a curator, an artist, and a writer. He works with and alongside artists and their output, and calibrates the temporality of their engagement over time. His recent endeavors are guided by the notion of slowness, its labor and contingencies, and proximities and distances. Tang destabilizes the status of artworks and the status of documentation, as a moving target which could take the forms of photography, language, and objects. He has shared his art at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; IAC - Institut d'art contemporain, Villeurbanne / Rhône-Alpes, France; Musée d'art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, France; and Komplot, Brussels.