The Pierre Lassonde School of Fine Arts at Mount Allison is pleased to announce that Sheilah (Wilson) ReStack (’98) is the 2026 Pierre Lassonde Artist-in-Residence. Her work is a feminist investigation into photography as one of the possible materials for imagining desire, motherhood, and queer family into the world. 

“[Being back at Mount Allison] is an interesting experience of déja-vu, time and change, crossed with a desire to connect with place and students in ways that expand ideas of identity, archive, and document,” says ReStack. “It is amazing to work with such devoted student interns and imagine myself as them, long ago. I live in a city now, with my wife and family, and it has been nourishing to be in such a geographically beautiful location that is familiar and yet now appreciated anew.” 
 
During her time at Mount Allison, she will be working on the Archive of Queer Embrace, a project that uses the documentary truth of photography and the performative potential of queer intimacy to create direct documents that hold the trace of the queer body. Using the very foundational idea of light to expose, a foundation in photography, she will gather photograms of queer bodies and gestures of intimacy on the enlarger bed.  

“In the context of our society, there is often a need to make visible or legible oneself to the dominant viewership or society. In the case of the photograms, I am using the light of the enlarger within a shared, queer community, and generating documents that are abstract and gestural while also looking somewhat forensic or x ray like. This movement between recognition and abstraction, truth and gesture, document and shadow are all important ways of considering the queer archive as a place of opacity and visibility.”  
 
Having grown up in a rural community of Nova Scotia, she is interested in the possibility of queer inhabitation of spaces which can seem more conservative or perhaps, difficult, for queer visual representation. Student interns will be working with ReStack on the collection and documentation for the archive, as well as placement of images in public spaces. The Municipality of Tantramar has committed to placing images from the Archive of Queer Embrace into public space.  

ReStack holds a BA in English and French from Mount Allison, Bachelor of Fine Arts from NSCAD University, and MFA from Goldsmiths University. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Howard Foundation, and UnionDocs NYC and has been a resident at the Headlands, Visual Studies Workshop, STRUTS, Banff Centre for the Arts, and MacDowell.