Artist Talk: Tanya Marcuse

Free, Eventbrite Registration Required
Tickets/more information: theimagecentre.ca/events

Begun during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, Tanya Marcuse’s three-part series, Book of Miracles, emerged amid wildfires, political and social upheaval, reflecting the increasing instability and strangeness of the contemporary world. Inspired by the sixteenth-century Augsburg Wunderzeichenbuch (Book of Miracles), Marcuse uses photography, staging, fire, paint, and found materials to visualize phenomena that seem to defy the laws of nature, inhabiting the suspended territory between fact and fiction, wonder and terror. During this lecture, Marcuse will discuss the project’s three interconnected chapters—Kingdom, Portent, and Emblem—as well as her unusual and intense process. Portent, the film component of the second chapter, is currently on view at The Image Centre.

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About the Speaker
Tanya Marcuse (born 1964, United States) is an artist whose photographs and videos explore the imperiled natural world through elaborate constructions that trace cycles of growth, decay, and transformation. Her work is included in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and many others. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of numerous awards and residencies, she has exhibited internationally at venues such as the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York; Galerie Miranda, Paris; Julie Saul Gallery, New York; and the Denver Art Museum in Colorado. Marcuse has published her work in several books, including Undergarments and Armor (2005), Wax Bodies (2012), Fruitless/Fallen/Woven (2019), and Deer (2026). She teaches in the Photography Program at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley.

About the Exhibition
Tanya Marcuse: Portent
September 9–December 5, 2026
Salah J. Bachir New Media Wall
Curator: Paul Roth
Tanya Marcuse’s multichannel video Portent presents ominous scenes of the natural world—trees swaying in the wind, vapour rising from volcanic fumaroles, icy branches illuminated by flickering light, and other small disturbances that hint at forces beyond our understanding. The quiet is deliberate; the frame remains fixed while the environment shifts restlessly within it, evoking a tension between stillness and motion, beauty and unease, the known and unknown.
Marcuse describes her work as an exploration of the kinship between disaster and the sublime, and of the ways the world around us is continually threatened, transformed, and made strange. Portent forms part of her expansive series Book of Miracles (2020–26), inspired by the Augsburger Wunderzeichenbuch, a 16th-century illuminated manuscript depicting natural disasters, supernatural phenomena, celestial spectacles, and unexplained oddities. Like the fantastic visions of the original, Portent’s tableaux slip toward the uncanny, suggesting an anxious molting of nature—the instability of change into a new and unknowable state of being.
Created against our present-day backdrop of extreme weather, political upheaval, and the lingering disorientation of the pandemic, Portent channels a heightened awareness of our entanglement with a rapidly changing planet. In the delicate tremor of leaves and grasses, Marcuse conveys a sense of awe shot through with foreboding—a recognition that the fragile systems sustaining us are as uncertain as they are wondrous.