Tanya Marcuse in Conversation with Daniel Mendelsohn

Marcuse won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 to pursue her project Undergarments and Armor. She has also held the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, the George Sakier Memorial Prize for Excellence in Photography (Yale), a John Anson Kittredge Award (Harvard), as well as two fellowships from the Center for Photography at Woodstock. She was a 2008-2009 finalist for the Real Photography Award, an international award for contemporary photography. Tanya Marcuse received her B.A. in Art History and Studio Art from Oberlin College, and her M.F.A. in Photography from the Yale University School of Art. Marcuse has taught at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Vassar College and Bard College and is represented by the Julie Saul Gallery in New York and Hemphill Gallery in Washington, DC.

Woven: In Process is Marcuse's latest body of work. The 5×10 foot photographs sometimes take weeks to compose, and during this process of composition, of collecting, arranging, burning, painting, and transplanting, there is change. Influenced both by the Dutch vanitas tradition and the allover graphic compositions of Jackson Pollock, she intends the photographs to be expereienced as exquisitely detailed still lives when viewed from up close, but to hold together as an immersive, more abstract composition from further away. In these elaborately artificial tableaus, the inexorable movements of nature are shown forth and growth and decay, beauty and terror, life and death are woven together.

This event is free and open to the public.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday, from 12 to 5 p.m., and will extend until curtain call on performance evenings at the Fisher Center. During regular gallery hours, visitors may enter through the Fisher Center parking lot entrance.