East Vancouver art exhibit explores queer daily life through video
“Feral Domestic” consists of three videos and accompanying mixed-media books
Some of the works around the Feral Domestic exhibit include art books. (Suneet Gill)
East Vancouver’s Western Front art gallery is screening three videos until April 6 exploring queer desire, family, place, and relation amid the climate crisis.
“Feral Domestic,” by artists and co-collaborators Dani and Sheilah ReStack, is an exhibit featuring documentary, fictional, and acted-out scenes. The experimental videos range in footage from their daily life in Ohio, to depictions of lesbian witches who found a way for children to live without water.
“Queers are here, and we’re here,” Sheilah says.
“We’re lesbians making a life and trying to think about what a family could be and wanting there to be images to speak to that reality because I think speaking for myself, and I think Dani, too, there’s not that much of it, even now, that’s made by lesbians, by women-identified [artists].”
The screening begins with Dani and Sheilah’s “Strangely Ordinary this Devotion” video, which was created in 2017 and is an exploration of the key topics across the couple’s trilogy, including queer desire and climate change.
Sheilah says as artists, the two were compelled to create something as a way of continuing communication and having another place to work out conflicts.
The next video, “Come Coyote” from 2019, is different from the other two films because instead of being projected on a wall, it is played on a futon mattress owned by Western Front’s founders, Martin Bartlett followed by Eric Metcalfe.
“We’ve shown the work with a bed in a little, small screening environment, so people could watch reclining, and we were thinking a lot about how to make it a comfortable space,” Dani says.
Reproduction and its implications are a central theme in the video, particularly the “reality/fantasy of both logistics and technology of queer reproduction, and the variations of [their] individual commitment,” reads Dani’s website. The video also begins with an insemination scene in a bed and explores motherhood.
The mattress in the gallery is also bound on both ends, which shows tension, Dani says.
The final video in the trilogy is “Future from Inside” from 2021. It features the couple’s queer friends, who play Dani and Sheilah and act out their perspectives.
“At that time, [it was] the third video. [We were] like, ‘We’ve already argued with each other. We’ve done that. Maybe what we need now is to hear this argument through somebody else’s mouth. Maybe it’ll make more sense if somebody else is articulating it, translating it,’” Sheilah says.
“I think it was just another effort to work through a conflict that doesn’t necessarily have a resolution, but we keep on trying to work it through.”
While the two were responsible for providing their arguments to the friends playing them, Sheilah says sometimes they did the opposite, with her trying to convey Dani’s side, and Dani doing the same with her.
Each of the films are also accompanied by three books of writing, drawings, and images, which add another element of physicality besides the mattress and an additional layer for the artists to express their ideas, Sheilah says.
“It’s funny because, in a way, they almost feel like diaries that would have preceded the videos, but actually they came after,” Sheilah adds. “There’s a scrappiness to it and a sort of DIY aesthetic.”
Dani and Sheilah will be at the gallery on April 6 to close the exhibit with their ongoing performance, “Shameless Light.” There, queer-identifying women and non-binary people will read out loud love letters they wrote under red neon lights.
For more information, visit westernfront.ca/events/feral-domestic/.
