What if, into a metaphorical creative blender, we tossed a cup of medieval unicorn myth, a few sprinkles of references to Dutch and Italian Renaissance painting, a pinch of Picasso homage, heaping spoonfuls of radical feminist performance art, soupcons of the “Wizard of Oz” and “Alice in Wonderland,” a dash or two of Divine Feminine concepts, several generous dollops of erotic and spiritual ecstasy, and – just for good measure – a handful of glitter?

The luscious, mouthwatering smoothie you’d be pouring into your glass would be the just-opened “Emilie Stark-Menneg: Thread of Her Scent” (through Sept. 22). It is the first exhibition in a new program called Momentum at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland that will feature the next generation of artists with longstanding commitments to Maine. If you thought you knew Stark-Menneg’s work, prepare yourself to have your expectations blown clear out of the water.

The premise for the show comes from the turn-of-the-16th century unicorn tapestries on permanent display at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval collections housed in a Manhattan building constructed after World War II from sections of bombed-out European churches and abbeys. Stark-Menneg also draws upon the Musée de Cluny’s “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestries, woven around the same time, which depict the five familiar senses as well as a sixth undefined sense that some speculate might have to do with the free will of the female protagonist.

Likely created to commemorate a marriage, the Cloisters tapestry cycle depicts the legendary hunt for this mythical beast, in some readings thought to symbolize the taming and vanquishing of the bridegroom. According to that fable, the unicorn is lured by the scent of a virgin so he can be captured and put to service for his ability to purify poisoned water with his magical horn.

This was irresistibly juicy material for Stark-Menneg, who set about subverting the virgin concept and releasing the maiden and the unicorn into a state of ecstatic freedom. The canvases are so huge that they needed to be taken off their stretchers and rolled up to get them out of her Brunswick studio, then re-stretched in situ at the Farnsworth. Like all her work, these surfaces teem with life and forms, but this time so densely that trying to determine what is receding and what is emerging becomes a chimerical quest. The combination of scale and compositions that seem to swirl, explode forth and blind you with neon colors can make you swoon.

What you can experience if you just release yourself into this rapturous allegory is an epic sensuality. Picking up on the Cluny tapestries, each canvas features different fragrant blooms and fruits – lilacs, roses, pink-speckled lilies, oranges, poppies. The unicorn appears in all of them, but because of the density of the compositions, it’s sometimes a sort of “Where’s Waldo?” hunt to find him. And in a couple, the animal’s horn appears instead on the heads of either Stark-Menneg or her partner, the artist John Bisbee.

Stark-Menneg and Bisbee acted out poses of unrestrained joy and freedom that the artist transposed onto the works as ghostly figures hovering amongst the effulgent profusions of flora – arms outstretched, eyes closed, heads cocked back toward the sky. Eroticism permeates these images. In the title painting, “Thread of Her Scent,” Stark-Menneg channels the feminist performance artist Carolee Schneemann who, in 1975, debuted her work “Interior Scroll.” This involved pulling a scroll out of her genitals and reading aloud her original blend of poetry and manifesto. In Stark-Menneg’s two-dimensional psychedelic re-enactment, the artist pulls the “thread of her scent” from her own sex.

In “Lilac Wine,” Bisbee stands fully clothed, arms akimbo and open-mouthed, presumably wailing with joy. This seems tame enough, until we notice that the fly of his jeans is lined with glitter, a be-sparkled portal to pleasure.

There are less sexually charged images of Bisbee and Stark-Menneg too: Bisbee playing a guitar and singing a song (his alter ego depicted in the adjacent “Lilac Wine,” but there channeled through Franz Hals’s 1623-24 figure in “The Lute Player.” And Stark-Menneg, who has the lithe frame and prancing grace of wood sprite, exudes (outwardly at least) the perfect demeanor to be a stand-in for the virgin bait. In “Daylily Rider,” she flings her arms wide and closes her eyes, dressed in a toga-like garment like a maiden from a Dionysian feast, lost in an innocent, almost childlike reverie.

Yet, clearly, Stark-Menneg is not the innocently naïve ingenue of the unicorn legends. Her paintings are loaded with art reference, sometimes devious humor and a kind of sickly sweetness that also pushes the envelope toward ideas of violence, over-ripeness and putrefaction and, inevitably, death. You can almost smell the cloying scent of the oversized lilies or the delirious perfumes of lilacs and roses. But the flowers are so in-your-face and enormous that they can feel unsettlingly, too, like some poisoned lethal temptation. These paintings, in other words, are like life: where joy and love and pleasure careen a bit uncomfortably close to evil, lust and danger.

Stark-Menneg carries over imagery directly from the tapestries, but tweaks it in teasing, taunting ways. She gives a hopping rabbit lifted from one of the Cloisters tapestries the slightly shifty bearing of the animal that led Lewis Carroll’s Alice down the proverbial rabbit hole (itself a metaphor for loss of innocence). Also in the original Cloisters works, there is a dog that looks rather like a seal, which Stark-Menneg scrapes with her palette knife to appear like some bizarre mythic apparition. And a bee made from pigment pushed through a screen then transferred to canvas looks especially threatening because of the rough texture created by this technique. It looks as though touching it will hurt you.

This is virtuosic painting. Stark-Menneg’s plethora of visual tools might be lost in the wild, effusive energy of these overwhelming works. But the further immersed in them we become, we see that she is staining her canvases, dripping and splashing paint onto them, spray painting, scraping, pushing pigment through screen, applying thick, confident brushstrokes and so on. It adds to the visual cacophony and the sense of being swept ineluctably into the vortex of her fantastical world. The effects are, quite simply, spectacular.

The last painting of the cycle finds Stark-Menneg asleep amidst a bed of gigantic poppies, one hand over the barrel of a gun (actually a sculpture Bisbee made from nails). It feels tense and dangerous at the same time that it exudes peace and slumber. I didn’t know when I first looked at it whether it spelled some sort of tragedy for the maiden. But the poppies are actually alluding to the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy and her crew enter a field of poppies that the Wicked Witch has placed in their path, putting them to sleep and thus stalling their arrival at the Emerald City. “I was thinking,” explained Stark-Menneg when I visited her studio before the show, “that maybe I could put all the hunters to sleep.”

Indeed, this story has a happy ending. In her artist statement, Stark-Menneg writes: “Perhaps within this fragrant cloister there is room for transgression, decay, and sensuality, where the maiden and the unicorn, two misfits out of sync with their given roles, can finally run free. They crisscross centuries and continents, splashing through streams and fountains, throwing the hunters off their scent as they race towards wonder.”

My advice? Race toward wonder yourself and make a beeline to the Farnsworth. The artist will be talking about her unicorn paintings and her process at 5 p.m. May 16.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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