Diana Thater
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Diana Thater (born 1962, San Francisco) is an American video installation artist. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
Thater received her undergraduate degree from NYU in Art History and her MFA from Art Center College of Design.
Since her first solo show in 1991, she has exhibited widely throughout North America and Europe, with one-person exhibitions at Dia Center for the Arts (2001), the Vienna Secession (2000), The Museum of Modern Art (1998),[1] the MAK Center for Art and Architecture Los Angeles (1998), the Walker Art Center (1997), the Kunsthalle Basel (1996), Salzburger Kunstverein (1996), The Renaissance Society (1995), and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (1994), among many others. In March of 2004 the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen and the Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany opened a simultaneous two-museum survey exhibition of her work from 1993 to 2003.
Her numerous group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (2006, 1997, 1995) and the Carnegie International (1999). She was the recipient of the Phelan Award in Film and Video in 2006 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), [2] an Etant-donnes Foundation Grant (1996), and an NEA Fellowship (1993). Since 2000, Thater has been the artist-in-residence for The Dolphin Project, a non-profit organization that protects cetaceans from slaughter, captivity, and abuse.
Her work is held in many public collections including the The Guggenheim, [3] the Tate,[4] the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago,[5] the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,[6]and the Walker Art Center.[7]
[edit] Work
Thater’s work explores the temporal qualities of video, while literally expanding it into space. She is best known for her site-specific installations in which she manipulates architectural space through forced interaction with projected images and tinted light, such as knots + surfaces (2001). [8] Thater’s primary interest lies in exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world and the distinctions between untouched and manipulated nature. She has focused her lens on a wide variety of animals including zebras, tigers, bees, dolphins, wolves, horses, and most recently birds of prey for her exhibition at David Zwirner, New York. [9] Though she is a devoted activist for the environment and wildlife, Thater’s work is not meant to arouse sympathy or empathy, but instead to propose observation as a mode of understanding. The installations follow ideas in 20th Century art whose great innovation was the intense exploration of abstraction in painting and sculpture. Despite nods to structural film, Thater's underlying reference points are closer to panoramic landscape painting. [10] Thater’s stated belief is that film and video are not by definition narrative media, and that abstraction can, and does exist in representational moving images.[11]
[edit] References
- ^ moma.org
- ^ gf.org
- ^ guggenheimcollection.org
- ^ tate.org.uk Tate press release accessed Jan 3, 2008.
- ^ artic.edu
- ^ moca.org
- ^ collections.walkerart.org
- ^ Diana Thater: Knots + Surfaces
- ^ David Zwirner: Diana Thater - Here is a text about the world
- ^ Liz Kotz in Zoya Kocur, Simon Leung, Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, p104. ISBN 0631228675
- ^ David Zwirner
