Diana Thater

Since the early 1990s, Los Angeles-based Diana Thater has created pioneering film, video, and installation-based works. Her primary emphasis is on the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality, and by extension, between the tamed and the wild, and science and magic. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative and sometimes near-abstract works interact with their surroundings to create an intricate relationship between time-based and spatial dimensions. The subjects of her works reflect the occasionally symbiotic yet often calamitous relationships between mankind, the environment, and other living organisms, and are selected for their complicated nuances and contradictions. One work projects scenes from the postapocalyptic wasteland of Chernobyl, whose human population has been reduced to those who are responsible for clearing the dead but whose devastated infrastructure is being overtaken by flora. As in many of her works, Thater’s interest in portraying non-human life lies in their existence outside of our constructed concept of linear, narrative time and bounded space. In a related attempt to make viewers conscious of their physical space and subjectivity, Thater utilizes multiple, contiguous architectural surfaces as projection fields and tints the light of the surrounding space, animating the entire exhibition space and arousing the sublime.

Thater's work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Additionally, Thater has been selected for a number of international exhibitions, including the first Gwangju Biennale and Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, the tenth Biennal of Sydney, and the second Johannesburg Biennial.