Recent Reviews and Interviews
“The Agony and Ecstasy of Tanya Marcuse’s Labyrinths” by Stacey J. Platt
Hyperallergic, March 13th, 2024
Detail, Nº 2, Book of Miracles (Part I Kingdom) 62 x 124” UV Pigment to Dibond, 2020
“The effect is disorienting, engulfing, and ecstatic, recalling how Rainer Maria Rilke describes angels as both beautiful and terrible.”
“Against a background of blackish, swampy soil are two giant starburst botanical specimens that bear a close resemblance to the red spiky ball of the virus. A myriad of smaller, similarly structured balls are satellites to the two larger orbs. Running forebodingly across the length of the bottom of the composition is a tangle of vines, leaves, and gold-painted snakes. The whole image is more fantastical than natural.”
“N°2” is a teaser of the themes explored in Book of Miracles; as in the Augsburg manuscript, the photograph pulses with miraculous and ominous symbolism. As Laws of Nature moves from the real to other realms, it intimates a paradise lost, metamorphosed into inauspicious phantasmagoria.”
Tanya Marcuse: Laws of Nature, Review by Madeleine Boyson
Daria Magazine, Spring, 2024
Installation view, Tanya Marcuse: Laws of Nature, Denver Botanic Garden, 2023-24
“The artist’s large-scale prints “evoke awe of the natural world,” as the exhibition text asserts. [1] But look closer—Laws of Nature enshrines our world, elevating decomposition to sacred, cosmic, and allegorical proportions. Marcuse grounds her work in the biblical Garden of Eden’s aftermath, while conjuring a threshold between fable and reality, fecundity and decay—life hastening and death arriving. [2] In collecting, compiling, and photographing what the poet Mary Oliver calls “a rich mash,” the photographer crafts tableaux that consecrate rot and regeneration, complicate natural laws, and relish the sensuous extravagance of an earth that is constantly remaking itself. [3]”
“On the tightrope walk between abstraction and realism as well as allegory and aesthetics, viewers are neither certain they’ve absorbed the whole picture nor convinced of its truthfulness.”
“Photographer Tanya Marcuse explores growth and decay in nature” by Matt Moment.
Times Union, July 2023.
“Marcuse’s foray into photography commenced, as many good stories do, with a twist of fate disguised as a disappointment.”
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“Woven: Interview and Photographs.”
Truth in Photography, Spring 2022.
“I would say truth in photography is a fiction. I don't really believe in truth in photography. Like the way in which the Enlightenment Truth with a capital T is problematic. It implies an omniscient singularity, I think truth in photography is similarly problematic. I think photography has a staggeringly rich and complex relationship to fact, to description, and to actuality. But the method of creating a photograph, and the zillions of different methods of making a photograph, make it so that I don’t think there is the possibility of any kind of capital T truth in photography. I think it's very important to say that I don't think that is new. It is not because of Photoshop, it is not because of constructed tableaux. Photography, to me, has always been a fiction.”
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“Tanya Marcuse — Fruitless | Fallen | Woven” by Brian Arnold.
C4 Journal, April 2022.
“The repeating patterns, beautifully articulating both shape and color, are precisely what makes these images feel something like tapestries. More than just referencing the appearance of the photographs, the title of the series also reflects their composition. The images are meticulously patched together, utilizing high-end digital technology to create an entirely new understanding of landscape and biology. It is also easy to think of the patterns she creates as functioning metaphorically, that her compositional strategies suggest patterns of time, and that her investigation of Biblical mythology is about history repeating itself, time and again stuck in the same cycle of birth, decay, and rebirth.” — Brian Arnold, C4 Journal
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“Birthday Club: a conversation around Yale, Photography and Feminism” by Raphael Shammaa.
9 Lives Magazine, April 2022.
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“Conversation with the American Photographer Tanya Marcuse” by Raphael Shammaa. Focused on “Actual Size: Photography at Life’s Scale” curated by David Campany at ICP
9 Lives Magazine, March 2022.
Photograph by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi (detail)
Click on the image for the interview
“Poetic Photographs of Squid Ink Oozing Onto Pages of The NY Times” by John Feinstein.
Humble Arts Foundation, July 2021.
© Tanya Marcuse from her new book Ink, published by Fall Line Press.
“Marcuse’s images are both alluring and disquieting. These tableau-like still-life compositions reminds us of her background as a large-format photographer, and her iPhone brings a freeing informality to how she organizes form and space… Ink takes on a new layer of tactility from its once digital-only existence – photos you want to hold and handle as you attempt to figure out their mystery. I spoke with Marcuse to learn more about her process and the story behind it.” — John Feinstein, Humble Arts Foundation
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“Woven,” Bardian Fall 2021.
Bardian, Fall 2021 Cover.
“It’s not surprising that photography has had a love affair with dioramas. There’s a syntactical kinship in their use of vantage point, moment, and description to create an illusion of the world, a translation of a small piece of the world. But the veracity of a diorama hinges on including actual elements of the actual world.”
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“Gravity and the Garden” by Rebecca Rafferty.
Review: Eastman's moon photography and 'Woven' exhibits, Rochester City Newspaper, June 2019.
Woven Nº 11, 62 x 124” 2016
“In a way, the exhibits are macro and micro mirrors of one another. When we stare into the depth of space, we are seeing a tapestry of creation, endurance, and destruction happening all at once, side-by-side and layered. Standing before Marcuse's wide, periphery-swallowing images is like hovering above a zoomed-in view of the overlapping, unending life-and-death cycles of Earth; there's a similar level of overwhelmed detachment as when you try to take in the scope of the universe.” — Rachel Rafferty, Rochester City Newspaper
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Photograph Magazine, The Back Page, July/August 2019.
Diane Arbus, A child crying, N.J. 1967. ©The Estate of Diane Arbus
We asked Tanya Marcuse to tell us about a picture that means something to her, and why. Her exhibition Woven is on view at the George Eastman Museum through January 5, 2020, and her new book Fruitless | Fallen | Woven (Radius Books) was published in July.
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“Tanya Marcuse Creates and Photographs Tapestries of Flora and Fauna for 'Woven'” by Dzana Tsomondo.
Photo District News, September/October 2017
Woven Nº 17, 62 x 124” 2016
“The large-scale images of flora and fauna in Tanya Marcuse's new project, 'Woven,' are reminiscent of medieval tapestries. The 'natural' world that Marcuse depicts is in fact painstakingly crafted. The result is neither nature photography, nor a work of pure abstraction, but some commingling of the two.” — Dzana Tsomondo, PDN
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“Tanya Marcuse: Life and Death in the Allegorical Garden” by Michael Kurcfeld.
Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2016.
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“Goings on About Town: Tanya Marcuse” by Vince Aletti.
The New Yorker, January 2014.
Fallen Nº 496, 62 x 77”, 2013
“At first glance, the New York photographer’s large, richly colored pictures of fruit rotting on the ground look like details of antique tapestries. Seesawing between the gorgeous and the grotesque, the work has more in common with Cindy Sherman’s mold and mucus landscapes. Marcuse’s densely packed images are just as wild and obsessive; despite their obvious, unnatural staging, they feel almost alarmingly out of control. Everything here is overripe and swarming. Cicadas, snakes, a bat, and a desiccated frog nestle among dead leaves, along with wrinkled, decaying apples as fleshy and pale as bloated corpses.” -- Vince Aletti, The New Yorker
“You Like It Half Dead” by Michael Johnson.
Exposure Magazine, Society for Photographic Education, November 2014.
Asher Brown Durand, Into the Woods, 1885. Public Domain.
“A post-transcendental pastoralism such as Marcuse’s entails an update that resolves this difference. The update comes as the deus ex machina of the camera, which aestheticizes even while it documents. While Marcuse stages the ephemera of nature to enhance their allure, the camera itself stages a survey of the source material, documenting what looks to be death and what looks to be life, like a vulture stalking the dead.” — Michael Johnson, Exposure Magazine
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“The Surprising Beauty of Dead Leaves and Rotting Fruit” by Jillian Steinhauer.
Hyperallergic, January 2014.
Fallen Nº 89, 36 x 44”, 2010
“There’s something to be said for an impeccable still life, a carefully composed scene of blooming flowers and ripe, luscious food. But there’s a reason that the form’s name in French is nature morte: things that don’t move are either inanimate or dead. A long tradition of beauty springs from the well of decay.” —Jill Steinhauer, Hyperallergic
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“Tanya Marcuse: Fallen” by Jean Dykstra.
Photograph Magazine, January 2014.
Fallen Nº 439, 44 x 54” 2013
“Marcuse’s photographs are ultimately more conceptual than narrative, and her references tend toward the painterly. Hieronymous Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights casts a long shadow -- there’s even a snake slithering through one of her photographs. The tradition of vanitas paintings comes to mind as well, with overly ripe fruits and half-eaten treats symbolizing the impermanence of life and the inevitability of death.” — Jean Dykstra, Photograph Magazine
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“Subtlety of Color and Decay Displayed: Photo Exhibits of Marie Cosindas and Tanya Marcuse” by William Meyers.
Wall Street Journal, January 2014.
Fallen Nº 182, 36 x 44” 2011
“In 'Fallen No. 182' (2011) pomegranates, the ancient symbol of fecundity, lie split open and losing their seeds in a bed of grapes, plums and leaves—the reds, purples and greens reminiscent of Marie Cosindas’s palette, although the scale and subject are quite different.” — William Myers, The Wall Street Journal
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“Tanya Marcuse, Fallen at Julie Saul Gallery” by Loring Knoblauch.
Collector Daily, January 2014.
“Marcuse’s images find impressionistic beauty in the natural cycles of reuse, where blackened apple husks and thorned vines provide the gestures of intermixed abstraction.” — Loring Knoblauch, Collector Daily
Click on the image to read the review