Fallen No. 439

This work belongs to Marcuse’s project, Fallen (2010-2013), a series of color photographs of tapestry-like tableaux of dead leaves, rotting fruit, spring flower petals, insects and other small creatures, which the artist creates in the woods near her home in New York’s Hudson Valley. Inspired by the work of Hieronymous Bosch, Dutch vanitas still-lifes, and medieval tapestries, Marcuse imbues her exquisitely detailed renderings of the natural world with spiritual and symbolic meaning. The photographs in the Fallen series conjure a ground-level view of the Biblical Garden of Eden after the expulsion of Adam and Eve, when the uneaten fruit of the Tree of Knowledge lies decaying on its grounds; in this image, a snake slithers away between two rotting apples. Wondrous amalgams of nature and artifice, the photographs are poised, as Marcuse puts it, “between decay and new life, randomness and order, flatness and depth, the natural and the fantastical.”