Warner Gallery Features Undergarments & Armor Exhibition
The Warner Gallery is currently featuring a photography art exhibition, titled Undergarments & Armor, which includes various black and white photographs taken by Tanya Marcuse.
Marcuse is an American photographer whose work explores transience, among other ideas. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Geroge Eastman House, and more. She studied Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA from Yale.
With the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Marcuse traveled to archives and museums in the United States and England to photograph undergarments, armor, and the museum forms that populate the storerooms, including breastplates, helmets, corsets, bustles, mannequins, and dress forms. The earliest objects date back to the 14th century, while no object is dated after 1900, ruling out the possibility of a living owner.
"I see these garments and suits of armor as sculptures of the body that, like a carapace, outlast their wearers," Marcuse says in her artist statement. "These personal effects adored, constricted, and protected the body all at once. The project extends my long-standing interest in sculpture and the body, presence and absence."
The 52 photographs in the Warner Gallery not only beautifully illustrate the garments themselves, but are intended to showcase how articles like these are tangible reminders of the absence of the living individuals - even though the garments and armor live on. As stated by Marcuse, "the strange fibrous and plastic materials that appear here and there in the photographs tie us to the present and interrupt simple nostalgia."
Undergarments & Armor will be on display in the Warner Gallery through April 25th.
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Marcuse is an American photographer whose work explores transience, among other ideas. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Geroge Eastman House, and more. She studied Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA from Yale.
With the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Marcuse traveled to archives and museums in the United States and England to photograph undergarments, armor, and the museum forms that populate the storerooms, including breastplates, helmets, corsets, bustles, mannequins, and dress forms. The earliest objects date back to the 14th century, while no object is dated after 1900, ruling out the possibility of a living owner.
"I see these garments and suits of armor as sculptures of the body that, like a carapace, outlast their wearers," Marcuse says in her artist statement. "These personal effects adored, constricted, and protected the body all at once. The project extends my long-standing interest in sculpture and the body, presence and absence."
The 52 photographs in the Warner Gallery not only beautifully illustrate the garments themselves, but are intended to showcase how articles like these are tangible reminders of the absence of the living individuals - even though the garments and armor live on. As stated by Marcuse, "the strange fibrous and plastic materials that appear here and there in the photographs tie us to the present and interrupt simple nostalgia."
Undergarments & Armor will be on display in the Warner Gallery through April 25th.
