Reflecting, Refracting, and Resetting: Maggie Stark’s “Shadow Light” at Fort Hall Gallery

On a rainy day in Maine, I pull up to an old brick mill near a winding river. Without knowing it, I’ve arrived at the perfect setting to experience “Shadow Light” by Maggie Stark. I weave past artist studios until I find Fort Hall Gallery. The space has been transformed into a black box, where works by Stark are installed like quiet vignettes in the dark. The atmospheric presence of the installation with flickering black-and-white images layered across time, feel spectral, like ghosts passing through. Soft, echoing sounds of nature (birds calling, insects humming, water rippling), ground the viewer in a sensory space where memory and landscape intertwine.

In a room filled with moving images, I’m first drawn to Vitrine (2024), a singular sculpture work in an exhibition otherwise composed entirely of video installations. The videos, which layer archival footage, digital landscapes, and intimate moments, create an immersive environment of entangled memories. In contrast, Vitrine glows softly, calling to me like an anglerfish’s lure. It’s partially obscured by prismatic glass, which refracts and fragments the light, echoing Stark’s video language of layered visibility and distortion. Inside sits a small urn, distorting the object and making it feel both sacred and inaccessible. The haunting images from the surrounding projections seem to collapse into this one object. It offers a moment of stillness, perhaps a container for memory itself. This image of obliteration reappears. On a nearby screen, an eye peers out of Portrait (2024). A face slowly emerges from clouds on a screen, before the image dissolves entirely into a field of pure white. The figure—Stark herself—locks eyes with the viewer. She confronts you, even in her absence. The presence of Stark feels more like a witness rather than an aggressor, one that retraces and relives the pathways she’s creating.

What’s striking across “Shadow Light” is how Stark resists the expected fade to black. Instead, her images fully bleach out to white—an unnerving reset that feels more like shell shock than closure. It casts an uncanny glow over the surrounding works. Rather than extinguishing the image, this luminous exit feels otherworldly, disorienting, and unresolved. You straddle the threshold between presence and disappearance.

The work was conceived from Stark’s return to Munich nearly fifty years after she studied there. She revisits Dachau concentration camp, where she first confronted the horrors of the Holocaust. By superimposing archival video of the camp with present-day footage, Stark examines how sites hold memory—not just historically, but generationally.

Examining Germany’s identity as a memorial landscape—shaped by remembrance culture and its reckoning with historical responsibility—provides the backdrop for Stark’s inquiry. As someone of Jewish German descent, Stark brings a personal dimension to the show, pushing beyond national memory into the realm of personal grief. The videos Passageway (2024) and Ashes (2024) move fluidly between Dachau and her family’s farm in Pennsylvania, where she scattered her parents’ ashes. One video plays in reverse, as if the ashes rise from the water, evoking less an act of mourning than one of transcendence or refusal.

By circling these moments, Stark connects genocide, familial loss, and the impossibility of closure. Her work doesn’t mourn so much as it lingers. She creates a nonlinear experience where grief is reflexive and memory is unanchored. The images refuse to end, continuously looping in the space. In doing so, Stark builds a room where memory is not bound to chronology, but instead becomes something embodied, fractured, and luminous.  “Shadow Light” suggests more than visual contrast—it points to the simultaneous presence of what is seen and what is withheld. Mourning is neither resolved nor concluded. It’s revisited, re-layered, and re-lit. Stark doesn’t offer clarity, but she does offer presence—a sustained act of looking, even when the image vanishes.

---

“Maggie Stark: Shadow Light” was on view through May 17, 2025, at Fort Hall Gallery, 14 Main Street, Brunswick, ME.