Image: The Image Centre, Toronto
Tanya Marcuse’s multichannel video ‘Portent’ opens September 9 at The Image Centre’s Salah J. Bachir New Media Wall in Toronto, where it will remain on view through December 5, 2026. The presentation brings the artist’s ongoing ‘Book of Miracles’ series to an exhibition focused on the unstable, uncanny forces suggested by the natural world.
The video gathers scenes that are quiet but ominous: trees swaying in the wind, vapour rising from volcanic fumaroles, and icy branches caught in flickering light. Other small disturbances hint at forces beyond human understanding. The camera remains fixed while the environment shifts within the frame, producing the tension Marcuse identifies between stillness and motion, beauty and unease, and the known and unknown.
Marcuse describes ‘Portent’ as an exploration of the kinship between disaster and the sublime. Its natural settings are not presented as stable or reassuring; they are continually threatened, transformed and made strange. The work’s sense of awe and foreboding is connected to a present marked by extreme weather, political upheaval and the lingering disorientation of the pandemic. In that context, the video considers human entanglement with a planet whose systems are changing rapidly.
‘Portent’ forms part of ‘Book of Miracles’ (2020–26), a series inspired by the Augsburger Wunderzeichenbuch, a 16th-century illuminated manuscript depicting natural disasters, supernatural phenomena, celestial spectacles and unexplained oddities. The manuscript supplies a historical point of departure for Marcuse’s investigation of events that resist easy explanation, while the video carries that interest into contemporary images of environmental instability.
Marcuse, an American artist born in 1964, works in photography and video to examine cycles of growth, decay and transformation in the natural world. The Image Centre’s presentation is curated by Paul Roth. An opening reception is scheduled for September 9, followed by an artist talk with Marcuse on September 30.
