Dani ReStack

Request for the Giant Panda

May 14 - June 28, 2021

Gaa Gallery Provincetown

Gaa Gallery is pleased to announce the May 14th opening of Request for the Giant Panda, a selection of recent works by Ohio-based interdisciplinary artist Dani (Leventhal) ReStack. At Gaa Gallery’s Provincetown Project Space, ReStack will exhibit recent paintings and drawings on panel that transform material, image, and mark-making into tactile ruminations on family and multi-species relationships.

Inhabiting complex spaces, the work of Dani ReStack underscores the resilience of the human spirit by making visible the fibrous entanglements of relation. Through exploring subject matter from caregiving, desire, vulnerability, grief, brutality, and silent conflict, ReStack builds tactile connections that transgress normative boundaries between human, animal, and environment.

Through collage and montage, the works in Request for the Giant Panda build a kind of feral togetherness and articulate the liminal spaces and thresholds between the wild and domestic, life and death, inside and outside. Describing her work as a process of “accumulation and excision,” ReStack collects and compiles footage, images, and materials in and around her every day. Through an intuitive process focused on formal and narrative qualities, found materials, such as - fur, fragments of cloth, copper sheeting flattened objects, as well as photographs of animals and people, are glued, stapled, tacked, and sutured to paper and wood panel. Direct and layered, ReStack’s works feature images of loved ones, heroes, friends, colleagues, animals, and personal artifacts in symbolic tributes of gratitude.

Transforming a moment into an image and objects into a malleable material, ReStack, through collecting and organizing, re-frames fragments of specific moments, into a cohesive whole that offers images and narratives of queer desire, motherhood, family, and kin-making. In Request for the Giant Panda, ReStack illuminates and honors the natural world while building a new vocabulary for human to human, human to plant, and human to animal relationships.

Dani ReStack (b. 1972, Columbus, Ohio) is a visual artist and associate professor of drawing at The Ohio State University. In 2009 she received an MFA in film/video from Bard College. In 2003 she received an MFA in studio arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her solo and collaborative video work with her wife, Sheilah ReStack,  have been exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial; MoMA PS1; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Oberhausen International Short Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Hammer Museum; MuMoK Wien; and Anthology Film Archives among others. Dani ReStack is the recipient of a Wexner Film/Video Residency Award, the Kazuko Trust, the Eileen Maitland Award, and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice Visual Arts Grant. Her video work and works on paper can be found in the permanent collections of institutions such as Light Work (Syracuse, NY), UCLA (Los Angeles, CA), and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York, NY).