Afterlife

Works by Megan Bent and Maya Stern

July 6 to November 8, 2026

AfterLife is a testament to the love that resides within grief. Megan Bent and Maya Stern archive memories and connections through a continued collaboration with loved ones that have passed. In honoring the lives and loss of their ancestors, their work simultaneously challenges the systems that enact trauma and deny the fullness of a person's humanity. Bent honors her connection to her late father, whom she lost to cancer after repeated denials of the healthcare he was entitled to. Motivated by the understanding that everybody needs care and no one gets through life alone, Bent makes visible the fragility and vulnerability that we all share. By doing so, her work questions why certain types of care are stigmatized. While her anger at a system designed to fail her father is part of her grief, so is the depth of love learned from being his advocate and caregiver. In his physical absence, she is left with the artifacts of caregiving - hospital gowns, sheets, healthcare denial letters, and medical bracelets. She repurposes these objects, reflecting on the ways caregiver and cared-for are reciprocal between parent and child throughout a lifetime, and how caring energy passed between people can live on after death. Looking further into the past, Stern explores the relationship between herself and her ancestors, reanimating their lived experiences of wartime trauma. She challenges the mutability of memory and family narrative as it's handed down through generations. Her work reconciles the degradation of ancestral history with the duty to retell what must not be forgotten. Reflecting on a trip to Austria, Stern creates mementos out of the architectural and iconographical ruins of what was. Her weavings, screenprints, and cyanotypes are vessels that conceal, rust, and warp over time. These objects age along with her, mirroring the impermanence of history. In an effort to preserve despite all odds, Stern questions what we ultimately are able to understand and how to learn to love despite a lack of knowing. Crafted through the use of inherited personal objects, drawings and written testimony, their works archive familial legacies of resilience. Bent and Stern collaborate with their respective ancestors, retelling the narratives of those who, whether through political or social forces, fear, or distress, remain unable to share their own story.