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.