Maggie Stark
The Light of Final Moments
Sculpture
01. Vitrene, 2024, glass, wood, metal, ashes, 52 x 7.5 x 7.5 inches
Large Projections
02. Passage, 2024, KZ-Gedenkstätte, Dachau, Germany, 2024, 3:38 minute video loop
03a. Passageway, 2024, KZ-Gedenkstätte, Dachau, Germany, 2024, 2:07 minute video loop
03b. Ashes, 2024, Western Pennsylvania, USA, 2023, 1:15 minute video loop
Pedestal
04. Notebook, 2024, 5 x 7 inches, 60 pages, NFS
Monitors
05. Eisbach, 2024, Englischer Garten, Munich, Germany, 2024, 1:57 minute video loop
06. Uhr, 2024, Universität München, Munich, Germany, 2024, 2:00 minute video loop
07. Underground, 2024, Hauptbahnhof, Munich, Germany, 2024, 1:30 minute video loop
08. Walkway, 2024, Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2024, 1:00 minute video loop
09. Transfer Station, 2024, Haltestelle Ost-München Bahnhof, Munich, Germany, 2024, 0:48 minute video loop
10. Studentenheim (Dormitory), 2024, Ökumenische Studentenheim, Munich, Germany, 2024, 1:08 minute video loop
11. Portrait, 2024, Lindenberg, Germany, circa 1973/74, Photo source: Barbara Stenzel, 3:22 minute video loop
12. Heiliger Jakobus, 2024, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, Germany, 2024, 1:37 minute video loop
Price on request.
The Light of Final Moments
Maggie Stark
In 2024, I retraced the year I spent decades ago as a college student in Munich using old letters to my family as my guide, seeking to reconnect with a city and to a country with which my family has a deep and conflicted connection. Only a fraction of the video material I shot as I traversed the city is being used in this exhibition; the discarded clips, much like memory, form the scaffolding or underpinning of what remains.
I came of age as a young artist during that pivotal year I spent in Munich. I was 20 years old. Although little visual documentation remains from my year there, I have extensive correspondences between my family and me. These detailed accounts of my day-to-day life allow me to explore how time affects our perception of past events, and how such shifts impact our sense of self and place. Revisiting 50 years later, this second exploration created transparencies that overlaid and inflected meaning.
With video screens and projections, I seek to create an emotional landscape that grapples with the light and shadow of a time and place, one that touches upon loss and regeneration, as well as the rhythm of holding and letting go. What matters most in this process is not the details of my life per se, but how time alters the way we live with and within ourselves; and how the liminal state brought about by repetition creates a place where time is unmoored.
The title of the installation The Light of Final Moments is from Lev Ozerov’s poem Babi Yar, translated from the Russian by Richard Sheldon (cited by Jeremey Eicher’s Time’s Echo – chapter nine).
Bio
Maggie Stark was born in Kansas City and lives in Boston, MA. She has exhibited her work throughout the region, including the HallSpace and Kayafas Gallery in Boston, Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, ME. She was an affiliate of the Boston Sculptors Gallery for nine years and has held residencies at the Corning Museum of Glass, the Millay Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. Awards include a Cultural Fellowship from the Goethe Institute in Berlin and an Artist Residency Fellowship at the Haslla Art World Museum in South Korea.