Before photographing her latest natural tableau, Tanya Marcuse poured water gently down the angled surface, watching it meander between scraps of fur, bleached bones, bittersweet, and fallen branches. She hoped the water would help sprout the seeds she scattered, new green growth to add a vibrant contrast to the decomposing elements. The scene is the latest in a series of tableaus she’s created since 2015, which Marcuse captures in large-scale, mostly five-by-10-foot, photographs. Usually she assembles a tableau in a tent outside her Rhinecliff home, but for this exhibit, “Woven: An Ecological Tapestry,” she wanted to share the process and constructed one within Kingston’s CPW galleries.
While Marcuse’s work now appears in museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, she discovered photography almost by accident. When she attended Bard at Simon’s Rock, she couldn’t sign up for the art course she wanted and begrudgingly opted for photography. Within six weeks photography had changed her life, allowing her to investigate and interpret the world through her distinctive lens. She never wanted to take “polite photographs of architecture and flowers.” Instead she was fascinated by mortality and decay. “Death had an early presence in my work,” says Marcuse.
For one of her first projects Marcuse photographed the interior of a slaughterhouse, then she embarked on “Ars Moriendi: The Art of Dying,” a project in which she photographed the painter, Balcomb Green.
“They were photographs of him painting or working,” says Marcuse. “They were very odd, because he was a nudist, this 85-year-old naked man. I was very aware that my photographs would outlast the person.”
For as long as she can remember Marcuse has been acutely aware of life’s impermanence. Even before a fifth grade classmate died. “I remember thinking about that, just that it wasn’t like somebody’s grandfather and that this could happen at any time and it would happen to everyone,” says Marcuse. “It was just something that I was always curious about in a way that was sort of fearful, but at the same time, there was something that I revered about it.”
Death is s a subject few like to ponder. Yet Marcuse finds beauty in the natural cycle of life and decay. “I think it’s the richest form of beauty, perhaps,” says Marcuse. “I always think of that Wallace Stevens poem ‘Sunday Morning.’ It’s often quoted, ‘Death is the mother of beauty.’ I think that kind of attention to decay in a reverential way is just incredibly rich.”
Her CPW exhibit, which runs through January 17, also features “Deer,” a collection of photographs and a film inspired by a deer that was killed by a car near her home. “It fell in a very lyrical way, almost like it was still leaping,” says Marcuse. “I was very moved by it and I took a few photographs.”
Rather than simply take “roadkill photographs,” she exalted the deer’s body by painting it gold, transforming it into sculpture, even as maggots spilled from its mouth. For 19 months she photographed the deer in all its decaying incarnations, seeing her visits as devotions. For one photograph she decorated the deer with flowers and for another burned it.
“The deer’s body started out so corporeal,” says Marcuse. “The smell was overwhelming, the weight of the deer’s body was heavy at first, and then it became so light I could wrap its body in vines by reaching underneath. I just kept picturing all of its particles dispersed into the universe, through vultures, beetles, maggots, all the different ways that it kind of existed, but in this completely dispersed form.”
For one of her last photographs in the series, she painted the deer blue and covered it with gemstones, giving it the appearance of a heavenly constellation. In April of 2025, the deer suddenly vanished and the project ended. “Until then, the deer had kind of a hold over me,” says Marcuse. “Just imagining it really as something sacred and mythic “
For Marcuse, focusing on the mythic cycle of life and death also helps to underscore the importance of the natural world that humans may want to cherish. “The environment is such a huge topic that sometimes I almost don’t name it, but I think it’s the underlying fuel in my work almost,” says Marcuse. “On the one hand there’s the existential impermanence, the reality of our mortality. But then there’s the unquestionably human-caused extreme ecological vulnerability and crisis that heightens all the more existential realm of impermanence. I feel like the work is also very much about a kind of reverence to the world that we’re destroying and also mourning it, as an act of mourning. Because it’s perfectly beautiful the way it works, but we don’t always appreciate it.”
“Woven: An Ecological Tapestry” is on view at CPW in Kingston through January 17.
