Emilie Stark-Menneg

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.”

A throughline informing the works in the exhibition is Stark-Menneg’s extensive background in performance, video, and film. In the studio, she uses paint to set the scene for imagined “site-specific 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. “Cinematic moments often appear as mirages in these paintings,” says Stark-Menneg, “recalling how the imagination flows over our perception of the world.”

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.”

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, 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.

On Location

September 2025

Selected Works

Press Release