Emilie Stark-Menneg: On Location
September 5–October 25, 2025
Text by Suzette McAvoy
Emilie Stark-Menneg: On Location
“It’s like a stream of feelings, intuition, joy, discovering things. Finding beauty where it’s maybe not. Seeing.”
—AGNES VARDA
by SUZETTE M
cAVOY
Emilie Stark-Menneg’s exuberant and lushly rendered paintings in On Location are visceral journeys of the imagination, untethered by reality, yet steeped in memory, experience, and her deep knowledge of film, literature, and art history. “The characters in these works,” she says, “are often engaged in states of ecstatic creativity and metamorphosis. They are filmmakers, musicians, sailors, and acrobats. They are foolish and broke, and going all-in on some dangerous vision. It’s a kind of resurrection narrative, that despite all odds, life persists.”
Ten years ago, on a snowy day in February 2015, I saw StarkMenneg’s exhibition, Good Luck, All In, at the Leonard R. Craig Gallery at Unity College in Unity, Maine—a small inland town best known as the home of the Maine Organic
Farmers and Growers Association or MOFGA. To say it was an unlikely place to encounter a brilliant new talent in the Maine art firmament is an understatement. Her work in that show included large-scale, vivacious, hotly colored paintings and sculptures—the word “buoyant” comes to mind. Against the drab monochrome of the Maine winter outside, it was like being transported to the Caribbean. She has been transporting me in her work ever since.
The paintings in On Location are some of Stark-Menneg’s rawest and most urgently expressive images to date. Working on unprimed canvas or linen as a “way of literally removing the ground to create an extreme condition,” she captures the instability and precarity of our current political and cultural moment. Employing multiple methods of paint application has been a hallmark of her work since the beginning. Here, paint is scraped, stained, squeegeed, sprayed, and, in some places, globbed on. These thick accretions, such as the one near the right edge of The Monarch’s, “contain the information for the entire painting,” she says. “It is both the residue and the ingredients that make up the picture—like a butterfly scraped its wing across the painting.”
A throughline informing this new body of work is StarkMenneg’s extensive background in performance, video, and film.
In the studio, she uses paint to set the scene for imagined “sitespecific stunts.” For example, in the title painting On Location, she was “thinking about filmmakers Alejandro Jodorowsky, Agnes Varda, and Werner Herzog, and how far they would go to get the shot.” Another work, Take Us with You, references the final scene in Fellini’s 8 ½, where the band marches onto the set of the spaceship. And Jaws Forever, a particularly timely citation as sightings of great whites in the Gulf of Maine are reported with increasing frequency due to warming waters brought on by climate change.
“Cinematic moments often appear as mirages in these paintings,” she says, “recalling how the imagination flows over our perception of the world.” In Couch Surfing, she draws inspiration from the 19th-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and the John
Cassavetes film, A Woman Under the Influence, merging the two “to create a new feminist iconography—a housewife surfing into the sublime.” Perhaps channeling filmmaker Varda, an avowed feminist and intuitive creator, who said, “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”
In 2024, Stark-Menneg’s cycle of paintings reimagining the tale of the unicorn was the subject of the exhibition “Thread of Her Scent” at the Farnsworth Art Museum, the inaugural presentation in the museum’s Momentum series, which showcases the work of outstanding next-generation Maine artists. In his review of the exhibition for The Brooklyn Rail, Christopher Crosman writes, “The energetic, irrepressible canvases of Emilie Stark-Menneg are at once familiar and strange. They are eye-catching, seductive, and upon longer, closer looking, become cheerfully subversive. These are restless worlds where momentum cancels color, where surprise counts far more than meaning. Is meaning.”
In On Location, Stark-Menneg continues to draw us into her “restless worlds.” Facing unknown futures, poised on the edge between euphoria and despair, the artist offers us a way forward, subverting societal norms, dancing on tables, playing sonatas on rooftops, finding solace in a small boat at sea. “In a society obsessed with algorithms and surveillance,” she says, “I am interested in movement as a form of resistance. These paintings are analog improvisations on a quest toward some mystical other.” •
Couch Surfing, 2024-25, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70 in.
Cribstone Swimmers, 2025, acrylic on linen, 20 x 18 in.
Blackberry Eclipse, 2024-25, acrylic on linen, 24 x 24 in.
Fawn, 2024-25, acrylic on linen, 20 x 16 in.
Forever,
Jaws
2024-25, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70 in.
French Dip, 2023-25, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70 in.
Friends, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 14 x 14 in.
Take Us with You, 2023-25, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70 in.
Halfway Rock, 2024-25, acrylic on canvas, 52 x 42 in.
Midsummer Night’s Song, 2025 acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70 in.
From Here to There, 2024-25, acrylic on linen, 24
x 24 in.
Sea of Galilee (after Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee), 2024-25 acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70 in.
Seabed, 2024-25, acrylic on linen, 12 x 10 in.
On Location, 2024-25, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 54 1/2 in.
Swamped, 2024-25 acrylic on linen, 16 x 20 in.
Lighthouse, 2025 acrylic on canvas, 10 x 12 in.
The
, 2024-25
acrylic on linen, 20 x 24 in.
Cut
Chalet, 2025
acrylic, glitter and four-leaf clovers on canvas, 22 x 26 in.
Shamrock
Monarch’s,
The
2024-25, acrylic and oil on canvas, 70 x 50 in.
Period Piece, 2024-25, acrylic on linen, 24 x 20 in.
Rooftop Sonata, 2024-25
acrylic and oil on canvas, 70 x 70 in.
Do Us Party
Till Death
, 2025 acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70 in.
Wing Catcher, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 20 x18 in.
Emilie Stark-Menneg
Emilie Stark-Menneg received her MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019 and her BFA in Combined Media from Cornell University in 2007. Her studio is in Brunswick, ME. In addition to Thread of Her Scent at the Farnsworth Art Museum (2024), recent solo exhibitions include Supernatural (2023) at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Strawberry Moon (2021) at Morgan Lehman Gallery and Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, both in NYC. She has shown nationally and internationally in group shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong; and Nexx Asia in Taipei, Taiwan. Her installation Sing Me to Another Sound was included in the 2015 Portland Museum of Art Biennial, and she has collaborated with the American poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon on several performances, including at the Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial and the DeCordova Museum’s 2019 Biennial. She was recently awarded a Surf Point Foundation Residency in York, ME. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.