Ink

by Tanya Marcuse

Ink showcases an unusual body of work by Tanya Marcuse which came about serendipitously after her young son insisted on trying nocturnal squid fishing one summer in Maine. Unlike the majority of Marcuse’s large-scale, elaborate works, these images were made with an iPhone camera, a more spontaneous and versatile tool. 

The early broadside from which the textual and graphics elements of Ink are drawn shows a giant squid which washed up in Holland in 1566, along with the warning “As thou this formed fishe doest see / Changed from his state / So many men in eche degree / From kynd degenerate.” Marcuse’s uncanny images, in which the bodies of squid spread acrobatically across newspaper headlines, fashion advertisements, and marriage announcements, echo the broadside's sense of moral warning and impending apocalypse. As the squid ink obscures the printer’s ink, the photographs explore the materiality of the newspaper and the dynamic interplay between its sense of fact and order and the abstract, primordial chaos of the tangled tentacles. Both in their physical presence and the inky marks they leave behind, the bodies of the squid both obscure and transform the apparently objective narratives of the newspaper.

Artist Biography

Tanya Marcuse is an American photographer whose work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman House, the Yale Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. She studied Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA from Yale. She has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and is currently an Artist in Residence in the Photography Program at Bard College. Visit www.tanyamarcuse.com for more information.

Ink By Tanya Marcuse

$45.00 Sale Save
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse
Ink By Tanya Marcuse

Ink By Tanya Marcuse

$45.00 Sale Save

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Ink showcases an unusual body of work by Tanya Marcuse which came about serendipitously after her young son insisted on trying nocturnal squid fishing one summer in Maine. Unlike the majority of Marcuse’s large-scale, elaborate works, these images were made with an iPhone camera, a more spontaneous and versatile tool. Marcuse’s uncanny images, in which the bodies of squid spread acrobatically across newspaper headlines, fashion advertisements, and marriage announcements, echo the broadside's sense of moral warning and impending apocalypse. As the squid ink obscures the printer’s ink, the photographs explore the materiality of the newspaper and the dynamic interplay between its sense of fact and order and the abstract, primordial chaos of the tangled tentacles. Both in their physical presence and the inky marks they leave behind, the bodies of the squid both obscure and transform the apparently objective narratives of the newspaper.

 

Released 2021
22 color photographs
60 pages
Softcover
11” x 14”
First Edition of 300
ISBN 978-1-7348312-0-7