The Brooklyn Rail

Return of the Triumphal Mother is a mixed-media installation of new work by artists Dani and Sheilah ReStack. The installation consists of a twenty-minute-or-so looping video, the title of which is the same as the exhibition, and of a series of photogram prints, a drawing, and an altered photograph, all of which appear outside the theater space. The video is the anchor of the show and is projected against a corner of the gallery cordoned off by thick black curtains. Searching for the curtain’s opening and heaving it aside felt like a tiny trespass, and once inside, that feeling grew into an intrusion. The video depicts a mother and daughter sitting at an outdoor table at mealtime in what looks like their backyard. It’s a private, domestic scene, made even more so because of the mother’s posture. She is slumped over, her upper body resting on the table, defeated, vulnerable. Is she drunk? Exhausted? Dead? Her tattooed arm dangles off the side of the table and twitches every now and then. Okay, she’s not dead, but she’s still absent, albeit in a whole other way.

The clutter on the table, the women’s clothing, and the dishes aren’t fancy; this isn’t an event, it’s an ordinary scene. A wheelbarrow is propped against the vinyl siding of the house, a bucket of cleaning supplies sits nearby. At the tableau’s edge is a pair of pink galoshes too small for the teenager who is sitting at the table with her mother. Compared to her mother, the young woman sits startlingly upright as she stares off, slightly bored. Every now and then she picks at a dish of mush that sits before her. She’s uninterested in the mush, as well as everything around her—in that glorious way only teenagers can convey—and in this, she is as absent as the mother.

At random intervals, and for a second or two, the projection cuts off and bathes the set on which the video is projected in white light. The fact that the video is projected onto a set isn’t immediately apparent while the video is playing. When the bright white light cuts on, we see an arrangement of cardboard shapes, some bent and bowing out, and a piece of pegboard balanced atop a black milk crate. We see long strips of red masking tape on the floor, a mirrored piece of plexiglass on the ground, abstract shapes almost haphazardly painted onto the background, coiled golden wire dangling along a wall. When the video comes back on, you see that the figures in the video are mapped onto these set objects. The teenager’s long braid is projected onto the coiled wire, the red masking tape outlines the prescription bottle on the table but where the video ends, the tape continues elongating the bottle onto the floor as if it was melted. A zigzag of red paint painted on a piece of plywood merges with the decorative stripes on the galoshes. These momentary flashes of bright light reveal that the materiality of the set lends structure and shape to the projection, and its inverse: that what appears to be projection is actually paint, tape, and wire. Simply turning on the light exposes another reality but one that was always there, merging, augmenting, and implicating the other perceived reality. It is a profound metaphor for the domestic space, shot through with deceptions, assumptions, and projections.

As the video loops, a female voice quietly recites pieces of text, each of which begins with words that correspond to the prints outside and the name of a weed, followed by its colloquial names. “Yellow sweet clover, common lelilot, sweetclover, field melilot,” the voice says and then go on to tell us that yellow sweet clover grows so quickly that during wars it can be used as substitute feed for animals. Is the mush the teenager eating the human equivalent of yellow sweet clover? What kind of war might this family be experiencing? As the voice on the soundtrack continues—it becomes apparent the voice is the mother in the video addressing her daughter—she shares childhood memories, family stories, and wishes for her daughter’s future that, taken with the incantation of the plants, feel like protection spells: “Dani wants to protect you from men who she sees as predatory. I want to protect you from addiction which I see as a loss of control.”

Like all mothers’ wishes for their children, the wishes have more to do with the mother than the child. These spells call out family trauma and abuses, the oppressions the mothers have endured, their fears, their values. Dani and Sheilah ReStack’s work centers queer family and domesticity, and they often use their own home, their children, and themselves in their videos and performances. Their work questions the distinction between art and lived reality. And Return of the Triumphal Mother takes it one metaphysical step further, showing us just how much the border quivers between perception and materiality.