Diana Thater
02 - 29 Sep 2005
Diana Thater has been a pioneer of video and film installations for over ten years, and her works explore the nature and possibilities of these media. Her work aims to make viewers look anew at architectural environments and the way they perceive video and film.
The natural world has been a recurring motif in Thater’s work since the early 1990s, bringing the outdoors into the gallery, and addressing the relationship between modern technology and notions of beauty and the sublime. Thater takes the developing idea of the technological sublime and inverts it, insisting that the presence of technology makes the natural sublime stand out more starkly.
Thater’s works are purposefully non-narrative, and she uses filming and editing techniques, including close-ups, double exposures, blending different speeds, and dropping frames, to unsettle our normal viewing pattern. The animal subjects’ movement in time and space is depicted as simultaneous, continuous and multiple, accentuating the unsettling nature of the viewing experience.
Thater filters incoming natural light through coloured gels to reposition the building as an integral part of the work’s composition. Moving through the gallery, viewers step into and becomes part of the work, their shadows creating a direct relationship between themselves and the video images.
Perpetual Motion Perfect Devotion presents two new groups of work. In Perpetual Motion II (2005), the seemingly erratic flight of the bright orange Monarch butterfly, filmed in its winter habitat of Michouacan, Mexico, is intensified by the artist randomly dropping frames and then speeding up the film. As a result the butterflies become hyper-real and animated in appearance. The manipulated footage is presented in a video wall of nine monitors, where the butterflies flit from screen to screen, in a room bathed in vivid orange light. Diagonally opposite the projections is Perpetual Motion I (2005), a second video wall where butterflies are shown in extreme close-up, moving in slow-motion.
Diana Thater received her BA from New York University in 1984 and her MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California in 1990. She was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1993. Thater has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and America, including a joint show at the Kunsthalle Bremen and the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Siegen in Germany in 2004, the DIA Center for the Arts, New York in 2001, the Vienna Secession in 2000, the St Louis Art Museum in 1999, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles in 1998, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1997.
© Diana Thater, Perfect Devotion I, 2005
Video still, Courtesy: Haunch of Venison, London
The natural world has been a recurring motif in Thater’s work since the early 1990s, bringing the outdoors into the gallery, and addressing the relationship between modern technology and notions of beauty and the sublime. Thater takes the developing idea of the technological sublime and inverts it, insisting that the presence of technology makes the natural sublime stand out more starkly.
Thater’s works are purposefully non-narrative, and she uses filming and editing techniques, including close-ups, double exposures, blending different speeds, and dropping frames, to unsettle our normal viewing pattern. The animal subjects’ movement in time and space is depicted as simultaneous, continuous and multiple, accentuating the unsettling nature of the viewing experience.
Thater filters incoming natural light through coloured gels to reposition the building as an integral part of the work’s composition. Moving through the gallery, viewers step into and becomes part of the work, their shadows creating a direct relationship between themselves and the video images.
Perpetual Motion Perfect Devotion presents two new groups of work. In Perpetual Motion II (2005), the seemingly erratic flight of the bright orange Monarch butterfly, filmed in its winter habitat of Michouacan, Mexico, is intensified by the artist randomly dropping frames and then speeding up the film. As a result the butterflies become hyper-real and animated in appearance. The manipulated footage is presented in a video wall of nine monitors, where the butterflies flit from screen to screen, in a room bathed in vivid orange light. Diagonally opposite the projections is Perpetual Motion I (2005), a second video wall where butterflies are shown in extreme close-up, moving in slow-motion.
Diana Thater received her BA from New York University in 1984 and her MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California in 1990. She was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1993. Thater has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and America, including a joint show at the Kunsthalle Bremen and the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Siegen in Germany in 2004, the DIA Center for the Arts, New York in 2001, the Vienna Secession in 2000, the St Louis Art Museum in 1999, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles in 1998, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1997.
© Diana Thater, Perfect Devotion I, 2005
Video still, Courtesy: Haunch of Venison, London