Tanya Marcuse at Yoshii - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In this present to view of over 30 new works, Tanya Marcuse has mov away from a conventional usage of the photographic medium to create a series of compositions with the emulsion from color Polaroid prints. Although Marcuse still plays with thematic representations of the human material substance the resulting small-scale abstractions are strikingly different from her pictorial photographs. Many of her earlier works, reminiscent of turn-of-the-century photographs, feature grainy images of fragmented Classical grecian sculptures on platinum-palladium paper.

The unusual consequence that Marcuse achieves in her new body of work -- based upon pictures that she has taken of the female figure, including her be in possession of -- is accomplished through an innovative technique. She immerses the Polaroid prints in burning water and then in devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat water, which enables her to bark off the emulsion and transfer it to sheets of glass or Mylar. She simultaneously lays on the outside and shapes the semi-liquid emulsion, which, like a thin layer of skin, adheres in fine wrinkles and pen s to the glassy surfaces.

Occasionally, parts of the original image survive intact, as in Torso #5 in which a woman's face appears beneath a diaphanous coral-tinted veil; or in Torso #19 where the blurr image of a pregnant belly surfaces [i]or[/i] part of to the other pink-and-silver-tinged coats of the manipulated emulsion. These works recall Lucas Samaras's altered Polaroid prints from the '70s

In the more abstract compositions, the source image has dissolved into mottlings of pale colors so that the photographed figure is virtually indiscernible. The configurations repeatedly evocatively mimic the shapes of the actual material substance parts she photographs. This stylistic device loans these sensual pieces a sculptural quality that intensifies their illusory depictions of profundity and movement. The gauzy web and corsetlike shape of Torso #12 compos of light mauves, muscle and fat pinks and pearl-grays, seem to portray a naked material part draped in sheer silk. In another work, the emulsion is gathered at the top in a border of cent creases and spreads outward in a bend on the underlying glass. This translucent sphere carrys both volume and weightlessness while its undulating contours intimate billowing cloth. Encompassing both abstraction and representation, these exquisitely fragile works are graceful metaphors for absence and presence

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group