Tanya Marcuse: Fruitless | Fallen | Woven

This three-volume triptych traces the arc of TANYA MARCUSE’s work from the iconic trees of Fruitless to the lush, allegorical compositions of Fallen and Woven. 

In Fruitless, Marcuse repeatedly photographs particular trees from the same vantage point, cataloguing their seasonal transformations. 

For Fallen, Marcuse uses frozen, decayed fruit from the same trees to depict an ordered paradise becoming wild and untended, a mixture of rot and growth where malevolent as well as beautiful creatures abound. 

Woven expands Fallen’s dense arrangements to immersive, 5 x 10-foot tableaux that interweave wildness and order, beauty and terror.

Watch the complete recording of Tanya Marcuse and Francine Prose in conversation HERE (2021).

Tanya Marcuse began making photographs as an early college student at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.  She went on to study Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA from Yale. Her photographs are in many collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the George Eastman Museum.  In 2002, she received a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue her project Undergarments and Armor.

In 2005, she embarked on a three part, fourteen year project, Fruitless | Fallen | Woven, moving from iconic, serial photographs of trees in Fruitless to lush, immersive, allegorical works in Fallen and Woven. The photographs in Woven are as large as 5 x 13 feet. Fueled by the Biblical narrative of the fall from Eden, these related projects use increasingly fantastical imagery and more elaborate methods of construction to explore cycles of growth and decay and the dynamic tension between the passage of time and the photographic medium.

Tanya is a student of martial arts and boxing as a method of cultivating mental and physical concentration and discipline. Tanya’s books include Undergarments and Armor (Nazraeli Press, 2005), Wax Bodies, (Nazraeli Press, 2012) and Fruitless | Fallen | Woven  (Radius Press, 2019) and INK (Fall Line Press, 2021). She teaches Photography at Bard College.