Diana Thater : The Sympathetic Imagination

Abstract

"Among the most important artists to emerge during the 1990s, Los Angeles- based Diana Thater creates groundbreaking and influential works of art in film, video, and installation that challenge the normative ways in which moving images are experienced. Her dynamic, immersive installations address key issues that span the realms of film, museum exhibitions, the natural sciences, and contemporary culture through the deployment of movement, scale, and architecture. At the heart of Thater’s work is the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality and, by extension, between the domesticated and wild, the scientific and the fantastical or magical. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative layered imagery engages its architectural surroundings to create complex relationships between time and space." -- Exhibition catalog, page 1