{"id":863217,"date":"2026-09-28T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T06:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/863217\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T06:00:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T06:00:21","slug":"tanya-marcuse-explores-nature-and-mortality-through-large-scale-photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/863217\/","title":{"rendered":"Tanya Marcuse Explores Nature and Mortality Through Large Scale Photos"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Tanya<\/p>\n

Tanya Marcuse, \u201cWoven, No. 17,\u201d detail, 2016.<\/p>\n

At the Center for Photography Woodstock<\/a> (CPW) in Kingston, New York, Tanya Marcuse<\/a> brings together eight large-scale photographs from Woven: An Ecological Tapestry. The exhibition traces more than a decade of Marcuse\u2019s fascination with growth, decay, and mortality. Alongside Woven, CPW will debut an 11-minute film, titled Deer, made with collaborator Ben Stechshulte, offering a new, time-based dimension to Marcuse\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Marcuse\u2019s photographs initially overwhelm through their scale. Measuring\u00a0up to five feet high and 10 feet wide, the Woven works resemble elaborate,\u00a0fantastical gardens viewed from above. Look closer, however, and the abundance becomes stranger. Flowers mingle with animal remains. Moss, fruit, insects, feathers, bones, and other organic materials occupy the picture plane. Some elements appear lush and newly grown while others have already begun to wither. Marcuse constructs each scene by hand, gathering, arranging, painting, burning, and transplanting materials over weeks or months. The resulting photographs hold beauty and decomposition in the same frame.<\/p>\n

Woven emerged\u00a0through experimentation. \u201cThere was just a lot of trial and error,\u201d Marcuse tells My Modern Met. \u201cAll of these things, as the methods evolved and as the process evolved, were getting closer to something I was picturing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marcuse draws from medieval hunting and falconry tapestries, translating their dense, all-over compositions into photographs shaped by materiality and change. Like a tapestry<\/a>, each image brings countless individual elements into a single visual field, revealing new details up close while forming a larger, almost abstract composition from a distance.<\/p>\n

Yet the works are never entirely fixed. Marcuse constructs each scene, while weather, insects, plants, and decomposition continually alter the materials before the camera. Their ephemerality becomes part of the image itself, with growth and decay registering the passage of time and the instability of the natural world.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m both at their mercy and participating in them,\u201d Marcuse says.<\/p>\n

Weather can even determine when a photograph must be completed. While making Woven No. 31 during the winter, Marcuse worked with ice and snow as part of the composition. \u201cThere was going to be a sudden spike in the temperature, and I would have worked on that thing for another five or six weeks,\u201d she recalls. \u201cBut I just had to finish it within the four days before the melt.\u201d<\/p>\n

The outdoor setting makes Marcuse\u2019s process fundamentally collaborative with the environment; it becomes part of the conditions under which each photograph develops. Nature and time then become an active force in the work.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo much of my work is about time,\u201d Marcuse says. \u201cIn the still image, whatever ways in which it points to time or meditates on time, it doesn\u2019t actually consist of time unfolding, and it\u2019s not durational.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marcuse completed Woven in 2020. The series ended as her practice shifted. She continued to work with the frame but began using it to consider transformations between ground and sky, land and water, and catastrophe and renewal. Those ideas eventually developed into Book of Miracles, a subsequent body of work.<\/p>\n

Deer returns to the concerns of Woven while pushing them into a new medium. Ben Stechshulte collaborated with Marcuse on the film\u2019s editing, animation, and sound. The film centers on the remains of a deer that Marcuse worked with over an extended period. Through light, adornment, animation, and other interventions, she transforms the animal\u2019s body rather than presenting it simply as an image of death.<\/p>\n

\u201cI covered it with gems to make it look like the body of the deer is like a passage to the Milky Way rather than a corpse,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The shift into film allows Marcuse to make transformation experiential. The deer moves through different visual states, extending the themes of metamorphosis already embedded in her still photographs.<\/p>\n

\u201cI actually really love the idea of giving a kind of creative afterlife to these creatures,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The work is not simply a way to arrange organic matter into compelling photographs. It becomes a way of attending to bodies, landscapes, transformation, and the passage of time.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like the work itself is the ritual,\u201d she says. \u201cIf I\u2019m honest, or even if I\u2019m being extra honest, I would say devotional.\u201d<\/p>\n

Together, Woven and Deer reveal an artistic practice grounded in transformation. The photographs preserve moments that could never remain physically intact, making impermanence not just a subject of the work, but part of how it is made.<\/p>\n

Woven | Deer: An Ecological Tapestry is on view through January 17, 2027, at CPW in Kingston, New York.\n<\/p>\n

Tanya Marcuse\u2019s Woven photographs transform natural materials into monumental tableaux that explore growth, decay, and mortality.
\n\"Tanya<\/p>\n

Tanya Marcuse, \u201cWoven, No. 30,\u201d 2018.<\/p>\n

\"Tanya<\/p>\n

Tanya Marcuse, Woven, No. 17,\u201d 2016.<\/p>\n

\"Tanya<\/p>\n

Tanya Marcuse, \u201cWoven, No. 11,\u201d 2016.<\/p>\n

At the Center for Photography Woodstock (CPW) in Kingston, New York, Deer extends Marcuse\u2019s exploration of ephemerality and transformation into an 11-minute film made with Ben Stechschulte.
\n\"Tanya<\/p>\n

Tanya Marcuse, \u201cDeer N\u00ba 7084,\u201d from the series \u201cDeer\u201d (2023-25).<\/p>\n

\"Tanya<\/p>\n

Tanya Marcuse, \u201cDeer N\u00ba 6054,\u201d from the series \u201cDeer\u201d (2023-25).<\/p>\n

\"Tanya<\/p>\n

Tanya Marcuse, \u201cDeer N\u00ba 9578,\u201d from the series \u201cDeer\u00a0(2023-25).<\/p>\n

On view October 3, 2026 through January 17, 2027, Woven | Deer: An Ecological Tapestry brings together Marcuse\u2019s photographs and film to examine the fragile cycles of the natural world.
\n\"Tanya<\/p>\n

Tanya Marcuse, \u201cWoven, No. 30,\u201d detail, 2018.<\/p>\n

\"Tanya<\/p>\n

Tanya Marcuse, \u201cWoven, No. 4,\u201d 2015<\/p>\n

\"Tanya<\/p>\n

Tanya Marcuse, \u201cWoven, No. 31,\u201d 2018.<\/p>\n

Exhibition Information:
Tanya Marcuse
Woven | Deer: An Ecological Tapestry
October 3, 2026\u2013January 17, 2027
Center for Photography Woodstock
25 Dederick Street, Kingston, New York 12401, U.S.A.
\nTanya Marcuse: Website<\/a> | Instagram<\/a>
\nMy Modern Met was granted permission to feature photos by CPW.
\nRelated Articles:
\nBlack-And-White Photo Exhibition Explores 50 Years of a Changing American Landscape<\/a>
\nThis Stunning Photography Book Unveils the Hidden Patterns That Define Our World<\/a>
\nDavid LaChapelle to Show Largest Retrospective of Decades-Long Career in the U.S. [Interview]<\/a>
\nPhotographer\u2019s Lifelong Love of Flowers Blossoms in Exhibition Documenting Art and Horticulture<\/a>
\n