On View: October 3, 2026 – January 17, 2027
Opening reception: October 3, 2026, 5-8PM
In her series “Woven: An Ecological Tapestry” (2015–2020), photographer Tanya Marcuse reflects on the fragility of the natural world and the environmental crisis. Her massive tableaux use natural materials to suggest cycles of growth, decay, beauty, and mortality. This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to view eight key images of this important series. Her meticulously constructed ecologies reflect on a world in which abundance is inseparable from precarity and loss and tips into plunder, where flourishing nature and environmental ruin coexist. Working over weeks or months, Marcuse gathers, composes, paints, burns, and transplants natural materials to create immersive scenes in which flowers wither, spiders build webs, and organic matter blooms and decays. By bringing together elements that would not naturally occur—spring growth in autumn landscapes, flowers and animals encased in ice, and birds embedded in the earth rather than in flight—these intricately crafted works describe a world in which climate change has unmoored the rhythms of the natural world.
“Through these constructed ecologies, I attempt to hold together beauty and terror, reverence, and grief,” says Marcuse. “Woven is a meditation on the fragile worlds we are in the process of undoing.”
In addition to “Woven,” Marcuse will debut her newest series, “Deer,” a coda to “Woven.” The CPW exhibition features one large-format image, a smaller fifteen-print sequence, and Marcuse’s extraordinary new eleven-minute film, made in partnership with Ben Stechshulte and exhibited for the first time. Marcuse’s new book, Deer (Roman Nvmerals and MW Editions, October, 2026), with an essay by David Campany, will be available for purchase online and in person at CPW.
Tanya Marcuse (b. 1964) is an American photographer most known for her large-scale photographs that explore the imperiled natural world. Marcuse began making photographs as an early college student at Bard College before studying Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin College and earning her MFA from Yale University. She is based in the Hudson Valley, in New York State and teaches Photography at Bard College. Her photographs are in many collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art.
Banner image: Tanya Marcuse, Woven, No. 30.
Grid (from left to right): Tanya Marcuse, Woven, No. 17 detail; Woven, No. 11, Woven, No. 31, Deer Nº 7084; Deer Nº 6054; Deer Nº 7084.
