Conversation between Sheilah Restack and Leeza Meksin on the occasion of Sheilah Restack’s solo show HOLD HOLD SPILL at Interface Gallery, Oakland, CA. July 17 - August 23, 2020

It’s the precariousness in these works that strikes me first. The plexi is balancing on the edge of a concrete plinth that is mounted to the wall and hung  5 feet up,ready to shatter.  18 gallons of water and yellow flower petals are held in a plastic bag, full like an udder, ready to leak all over the floor. There’s mud in the photograph because the paper walked for 2 miles while Sheilah took the dog and her daughter Rose for a walk, dropped Rose off at school and then went home. Shells, fur, dried flowers are hewn together, neatly folded, or tightly bound, brimming with archiving sensually. The works occupy an in-between objecthood that is hard to classify yet it’s hauntingly memorable (are they sculptures? photographs? maps? icons? talismans?). During the installation of this show, it was discovered that one of the concrete plinths had developed a small crack in shipping. Sheilah wrote to me about this stressful event, explaining that the parts that are perfect are meant to be just that --  how the precision of the concrete wedge lives in tension with the torn photo paper, found rock and imperfect sewing. After a couple days, Sheilah wrote that it has become, “The crack I’ve learned to live with.”  This phrase struck me as an epithet for Sheilah’s art, and also for her mode of being in the world.

- Leeza Meksin

LM: The works imply a messy and rich place which embodies all your roles simultaneously. Do you think these sculptures are self portraits? Or still lives of your lived experience with Dani and Rose?

SR: It is funny that you say that, I do think of them like portraits, but more like a portrait of an energetic exchange, a way of being or feeling, and very much in relation. They are a contemplation of the different roles I embody in my life, but also and most importantly, they are about the specificity of connection with another. I was thinking about those moments of connection with Rose, with Dani and also, thinking a lot about my connection with Anna, a horse that I ride. How the connection falls in and out. The distinctness of the feeling when it is there -- it is a palpable thing -- and how everything around me is the same when it passes, but there is an intensity with another that is gone.  I wanted to call forth the feeling by accessing a radical precarity that speaks to this feeling in relation…..Maybe they are a spell of memory or maybe they are a wish.

LM: Can you say more about radical precarity? What does this phrase mean to you and how do you think your life reflects this precarity?

SR: I am thinking about radical precarity in relationship to a queer existence, and also, to that of being a mother. These are both ways of being which are ignored or vilified for different reasons -- because both exist outside the command center of heteropatriarchy. I celebrate all the work that theorists and artists of color, queers and otherwise marginalized groups do that is so important in re-thinking, re-claiming and making less sturdy the white patriarchy. To me, this is a necessary invocation of precarity. My work is my own way of making precarious, through material translation. These objects are a self created precarity, and this is empowering to me, and possibly beautiful, and also, possibly fleeting. Perhaps this is part of the joy of pulling together and holding -- over these materials I can have power, for this moment while also recognizing the continuous state of being (the hold is impermanent.

LM: The idea that the hold is impermanent implies both our individual mortality but also the livelihood of our planet. Precarity as the condition in which we find our world today, due to climate change, extinction, pollution, just to name a few threatening forces (many of which are man made). When I look at the works in this show, I wonder if you’re eulogizing our world. 

SR: Certainly, in the video work that Dani and I have made together, the environmental crisis plays a major role in driving the experimental narrative.  I like your read that the precarity of my hold on Rose is also a gesture of the precarity of the planet. I want the work to get at larger issues, and I believe the personal is an effective way to get there. 

It is interesting to think about the works as a eulogy -- you are right in that the work may start with me wanting to make a monument to the precarity of the construction of a day, the brevity of the connection with someone I love, or a desire to chronicle myself in relation to the world. But, in the process of making with archival documents in space (monument / eulogy)  it becomes another thing. It resists being of the past entirely, because its physical presence, like you say, is about to spill or fall and so it feels almost hyper present. Maybe its very existence is a precarious map to the past and, simultaneously, a heightened present…a wavering proposal pulling from multiple tenses.

LM: It’s as if the works explore the ruin we’ve inflicted upon our home (not the domestic, but our global abode).  The hand-made contraptions speak to survivalist tactics, the objects allude to shelters and folding furniture while evoking disturbance-based ecologies. It makes me think of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Have you seen this film?

SR: Yes, I have seen that film… it had a big impact on me…  I still have visions of that water glass vibrating on the table, about to fall, and the dreamy/terrifying sequences walking in the post apocalyptic landscape... In Stalker I think it was all men who were the explorers, in search of the Room. If I am channeling Stalker I hope I am doing so from the perspective of the child, the pet and the wife/woman character who (in my version) go out and look for, or actually create, their own Room.

I think it is interesting to consider the works as survivalist strategies -- I wasn’t thinking of this while making them, but honestly, these structures are just as useful or absurd as the 60 cans of Chunky stew and other stockpiled materials I just helped my dad move to his new home. It is fascinating to see how value for the future changes, based on the current moment. For instance, I started using plexi years ago to sandwich and hold the images , and now it has a whole new meaning around safety (survival) in relation to the pandemic. 

I am also thinking about how I relate to the word survival in terms of how the works survive in space. They are not really future oriented objects (like cans of Chunky stew) they are too much made by touch and feel, bound together with rubber bands -- intent upon balance and fragile in a way that surviving into the future doesn’t equate with. But, I like this idea in that in order to survive in the future maybe we need a psychic shift into capacity for an extreme present. Maybe we can’t really learn how to respond to the future unless we allow ourselves to physically inhabit and be in relation to now.

LM: The concept of the extreme present reminds me that the works in this show all present actions: binding, stacking, walking, collecting, annotating. Various handmade and found objects are made into a whole with heterogeneous composites. Could you speak about the way in which you rig these sculptures together? 

SR: I think of the works as a balance of gestures. Ideally I want it to be a coming together of materials that respects the energy of the components, while also creating a new space that allows a new thing -- like montage, the 3rd meaning, generated by contingent relationships upon one another.  

In terms of making in the studio -- I come at it from two minds. I am often sharing with students the importance of child mind and critic mind. For instance, I often begin with letting myself experiment and pick things up and try putting them together. This intuitive self lives with the critic self.  The critic self steps in after a day, an hour, and says no - that doesn’t work, what a terrible idea… or, perhaps, that it does work…in which case there is the visceral feeling of achieving connection with the work itself. At this point, I leave it alone and come back to it later -- to make sure that is how I (still) feel. 

I remember you (Leeza) talking about how the works feel like the way you construct a day -- there is something haphazard about how it is constructed, but at the end of the day there it is -- the day -- it happened -- pulsing there, after all its exertions. I really resonated with this idea of the construction of the work being like the construction of a day. There are so many components that get put together as we go from making a meal to teaching to getting to the studio to the emails we need to attend to… and that ability to hold those things together is so improbable, but it happens. 

LM: Your sculptures speak in contrasts: hard/soft, liquid/solid, animate/inanimate, public/private, handmade/mass produced. Do you purposely set out to create binary relationships? Why?

SR: I know that binaries are how we have constructed our flawed making of hierarchical sense, through these kinds of establishments of difference; butch/femme, black/white, good/bad etc. I want to destroy this easiness of understanding.  I use materials like rigid plexi and heavy concrete in relation to torn photo paper, delicate thread and powdered chalk line. Perhaps they can be hybridized into a tender tension that reveals each one to have qualities of the other. Or perhaps together they create something that moves towards that state that Jose Esteban Munoz talks of as the idea of queerness being ‘not yet here’. I like this way of employing futurity as a way to imagine -- through material confusion. I think the binaries can get confused when they get all tangled up in each other, and so I am hoping that the work allows that kind of refusal of stasis, and what I see as a productive inability to place something. 

LM: I’m interested in your idea of the embodied photograph? Are the sculptures themselves embodied photographs, or are you referring more to the action of wearing photosensitive paper on your feet, and then collaging these photographs into the larger narrative of the sculpture?

SR: I think it goes back to your earlier question, about binaries, and why I am drawn to pulling things together from opposing registers. I want the photograph because of its truth and power as a document and its legibility, and I want the idea of embodiment because that is a lived and truthful experience as well -- even though the body is typically understood as gendered and less trustworthy as a documentary or reporting source. I want both of these things pulled together to see how they can exist in tension, and create a new credibility.

Maybe there is no real definition for what an embodied photograph is, you have to feel it. For me it functions as an idea that continues to yield questions, and allows me to have a relationship with photography, and teaching photography, in a way that puts a crack in the dominant system, and provides an idea for making and thinking and teaching towards.

LM: The walking with photo paper on your feet is both poetic and precise. Poetic because the action leaves an abstracted trace of your body in everyday experiences and precise because it’s a measure of time. How do you think of this action and the subsequent assembling of it into larger materially-diverse sculptures?

SR: I think of it like labor, and I love that these documents of labor are tattered abstractions. Mierle Laderman Ukeles talks about the labor of maintenance, and how invisible it is, and how necessary. She has a great manifesto from 1969 about giving yourself freedom to name value. It is this naming of value that I think is so much a part of our capitalist model -- and I have my own struggle in confronting, and trying to overcome, the patriarchal model of worthiness. 

I think these works are my own way out of that destructive game. They don’t really care about what part of them has more value -- they just balance there as a multi sided entity. They can be a minimalist form and they can be a handwritten note and they can be a prayer for my daughter. They hold inside themselves all these histories (of motherhood, of place, of queer desire and mundane life) that persist. The accumulation of gestures is held in this precarious balance as an evidentiary aftermath, and tender construction for the future.

LM: I love that phrasing Sheilah. It makes me wonder how your feelings about the work transformed after you installed it at Interface gallery? Did the movement from your Columbus studio to a West-coast gallery change how you feel or think about these works?

SR: It is exciting to see the work in a new context, a new place. It allows consideration of a new relation. I get used to seeing the works in a particular way in the studio -- they become familiar. I love that a show is an opportunity to be surprised by what the work can/does say. I want to acknowledge that Suzanne was really instrumental in selecting works for this show, and knowing what the space could hold. I think that sort of input is also part of the generative quality of sharing work in new spaces. Certain things about how the works are together had never happened before in the studio, just because they couldn’t fit together. So, seeing the reiteration of certain shapes (the half house shape, the angle iron, the concrete wedges), colors and spatial relations is exciting. I am still thinking about what kind of a sentence or drawing they make together. 

It’s interesting too, in that there is a certain kind of doubling back in time having the show in this area of California -- so close to where Dani and I and Rose and Rita were at the Headlands together about 5 years ago. Pieces of the walking prints in Hold House are from that residency. So, inside this present sculptural balance there are documents and ephemera (dust, mud, sand, plants) that go back to this landscape. It feels right to have it be offering itself back, to this place, in a material structure. I like the idea that our past actions can be a material component for fragile balance in the present.