Dani Leventhal and Sheilah Wilson: Stack for Carrington’s Hyena

Stack of the Definitions of Stack
Large usually conical pile (as of hay) left standing in the field.

Send the hyena to us. She can have the view from our window.
Circles of hay, goldenrod, yellow munsell.

I think I became the hyena once, or rather, I think I asked her to become me.
It is always easier to ask violence of another. Our bed sinks, while the leaves turn to face the sun.

You say that if I can’t stand you the doctors will change the meds. Just finish painting the chair.
Cover the yellow with the red. I want words that hold their shape. You pretend like your breath is golden smoke being released from the hyena’s ass.

DL & SW in response to Ann Carson’s Stacks and Leonora Carrington’s Debutante
A performance, Shameless Light, and screening of the artists’ film SOTD (Strangely Ordinary This Devotion) will accompany the installation at Iceberg Projects (date and location TBA).

Leventhal collects and chisels moments, stories, and images, placing them within loose constellations rarely unmarked by the specter of death. Her cutting is intuitive, not systematic. Micronarratives of birth, aging, awkwardness, and pain gradually take shape without ever fully congealing, as Leventhal allows her images to breathe even as she transforms their tenor through assemblage. The textures of the everyday are refracted through an intimate sensibility that dwells in the vulnerability of our fleshy bodies, our need for care and communion—and our cruelty. 

– Erika Balsom, 2017 Whitney Biennial Catalogue

Conflating the miraculous with notions of chance and arbitrariness, Sheilah Wilson’s work alludes to religious motifs from a perspective of a sincere and heartbroken skeptic. It often centers around the empty center, an impossibility that she bravely faces while connecting history, land and personal experience into fluid and surprising actions within her artistic practice.

– Leeza Meksin, Temporary Contemporary, December 2012.