Tanya Marcuse.

Artist in Residence at Napeague

Medium: Photography

Year: Ongoing​

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Tanya’s project in Napeague unfolds as a set of subtle, site-responsive interventions. Drawing on an established practice of working between constructed tableaux and direct field encounter, she approaches Napeague through small but charged gestures—most notably the use of beetroot powder as a temporary, bodily-stained mark in the environment. These interventions function as what she describes as a “wound,” briefly altering the reading of sand, path, and vegetation so that the land appears both mapped and injured, natural and artificially staged.

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The work is shaped by her long familiarity with the area, including repeated seasonal visits tied to fishing and everyday life in the East End region, which produces a layered sense of intimacy. Through her lens, Napeague becomes a site of productive contradiction: a fragile coastal ecology situated within proximity to luxury development and curated wilderness aesthetics. Tanya’s response is not documentary but procedural—she moves through the landscape with a camera and simple materials, testing how perception shifts when small disturbances are introduced into already highly mediated environments.

In parallel, her Watermill-related experiments with seaweed assemblages (“dead man’s fingers”) extend this logic of relocation and transformation, where materials collected on-site are recontextualized into studio and installation settings. Across these works, the complexity of Napeague emerges.