Julie Saul Gallery

Tanya Marcuse received her B.A. in art history and studio art from Oberlin College and later obtained her M.F.A. in photography at Yale University. In her work, Marcuse explores the relationship between the animate and inanimate, past and present, and the desire to make representations of things that cannot last. She uses shifting visual strategies, ranging from small exquisite platinum prints in Undergarments and Armor to lush color pigment prints in Wax Bodies and Bountiful.

Marcuse won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002-2003 to pursue her project Undergarments and Armor, in which she photographed corsets, helmets, cage crinolines, and breastplates, in archives in the U.S. and in England. She views these objects as sculptures of the body that once contained a living person. Nazraeli Press published the project as a lavish, three-volume set, highlighting the project's conceptual underpinnings. The series was featured in Dress Codes: The Third Triennial of Photography and Video at ICP. Marcuse turned to color photography in her next project entitled Wax Bodies, a series that featured photographs of 18th century Italian anatomical models. The photographs become Baroque and expressive; languid wax women stretch out before the viewer. Their faces are filled with longing, yet their bodies are opened, revealing the secrets of their anatomy.

In her newest series, Bountiful, Marcuse discovered a little known collection of wax models of agricultural specimens commissioned by Cornell about 100 years ago. The models were made almost entirely by one man, John Lawson. He even included his own body hair in the models, for the fibers of carrots and radishes. The Bountiful project is partly about Americana. Marcuse says of the project: "I love the humble ambitions of the models -to teach about agriculture and have three-dimensional, life-like models to use year round. But the names of specimens inscribed on the original matte supports: Refugee, 100% Profit, Bountiful, Perfection, somehow pull them to another place and become lyrical or ironic accompaniments to the objects."

Throughout working on these more conceptually driven projects, Marcuse's ongoing project Fruitless continues to grow and change. A small publication by Nazraeli Press, Fruitless, (One Picture Book, Nº 42) accompanied the show she had at Julie Saul. Marcuse photographs fruit trees in northern Dutchess and southern Columbia Counties in New York State, near where she lives. Fruitless records orchards as they change with the seasons, and unfortunately, with the times. Sharon Bates notes, "The platinum prints document the vanishing visual, economic and cultural presence of orchards in the Hudson Valley region." With striking intimacy, Marcuse captures the visual complexity of intertwined branches, while bringing to the viewer's attention that perhaps in a year, or a decade, these trees will be gone and only the photographs will remain.