Tanya Marcuse “Woven”

Julie Saul Gallery

[Image: Tanya Marcuse "Woven Nº 17" (2016) pigment print, 62 x 124 in.]

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Julie Saul Gallery presents Woven, its fourth solo exhibition of work by Tanya Marcuse. Woven is conceptually linked to Marcuse’s Fallen, shown at the gallery in 2014, but takes that project’s dense arrangements of flora and fauna to a newly immersive scale with color prints as large as 5 x 10 feet. These exquisitely detailed photographs, each the product of weeks of collection and composition, are perched between
the natural and the fantastic, evoking a Boschian world of allegory and fable.

The ancient Greeks imagined the machinery of fate as three women, weaving the lives of human and gods into an enormous tapestry, killing or giving life by snipping or knotting a thread. Through the medium of photography, Marcuse imagines herself introducing time and thus mortality into the lush flora and fauna that make up the millefleurs backgrounds of medieval hunting and falconry tapestries. “During the process of composition — of collecting, arranging, burning, painting, and transplanting — there is change,” Marcuse writes. “Flowers wither, spiders build webs, new shoots emerge, and corpses decay.” Influenced both by the Dutch vanitas tradition and the allover paintings of Jackson Pollock, the photographs can be experienced as intricately detailed still lives when viewed from up close, but also become dynamic, more abstract compositions from further away.

Although Marcuse composes all her pieces on the same wooden structure, each incorporates a distinct set of conceptual and visual ideas. Some are densely packed with both living and rotting plant and animal life, while others are more open, sprinkled with brightly colored flowers or verdant moss. What is common to all, however, is a sense of opulence verging on excess, a plenty verging on plunder. In these elaborate artificial tableaux, the inexorable movements of nature are shown forth and growth and decay, beauty and terror, life and death are woven together.
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Tanya Marcuse was born in NYC in 1964. She studied Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA in Photography from Yale. She has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship among other honors, and her work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the art galleries of Yale University, Vassar College, and Wesleyan University. She has published three books with Nazraeli Press: Undergarments and Armor (2005), Fruitless (2007), and Wax Bodies (2012). She is currently an Artist in Residence in the Photography program at Bard College in Annandale, N.Y.