Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/603573
"The work previously was very structured and very tight, but when people ask me what this piece is about, it's about liberation." —Diana Thater 304 CULTURED The artist Diana Thater, whose work possesses an inherent wildness, doesn't do commissions because she doesn't like being told what to do. The dolphins and gorillas that star in her videos don't take direction either. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination" surveys the past 25 years of the San Francisco-born, Los Angeles-based artist's pioneering exploration of our relationship to the natural world as well as to the moving image. Instead of merely projecting pictures on screens, she uses vast expanses of architecture as her canvas. Consequently, the exhibition is nothing short of enormous: 22 works over 20,000 square feet, marking LACMA's largest solo exhibition of a female artist's work and Thater's most expansive survey to date. The exhibition splits Thater's work roughly in half, with the period from 1992 to roughly 2001 represented in LACMA's Art of the Americas building. There, the windows have been coated in blue gels as a nod to her early manipulations of color. "When I first started using projectors, they had three cathode ray tubes: one was red, one was green, one was blue," Thater recalls. "They would combine to make one image, but I would separate them." That was the method she used for her breakout piece, 1992's Oo Fifi, Five Days in Claude Monet's Garden, a two-part installation created during her artist's residency at Giverny, France, which she took up shortly after graduating from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1990. The pulsating footage of flowers and trees in Oo Fifi became a surreal landscape of layered Day-Glo colors, projected onto both the wall and the viewer. It set the trajectory of her contemplation of human interaction with the nature, as well as her transformations of space. "When I went to graduate school, I was interested in how to make moving images that intersected with art history and architecture," says Thater, who studied art history at New York University and worked as an administrative assistant in a New York architecture firm before deciding that she wanted to be an artist. "Other artists have done large-scale projections onto odd sites and used the monitor as a sculptural object," says LACMA's Christine Y. Kim, who co-curated the show with Lynne Cooke, "but when you start looking at the dates of when she was doing these things, we start to see a real pioneer." Thater continued working in synthetic colors until her experience of filming dolphins in the Caribbean for the 1999 piece Delphine reset her approach. "The dolphins changed my process," Thater says. "The work previously was very structured and very tight, but when people ask me what this piece is about, it's about liberation." The resulting piece, mined from the 17 hours of footage captured with the help of animal right activist Richard O'Barry, ignores the standard limitations of gallery walls: The dolphins swim on the ceiling, the walls and the floor, immersing the viewer. "You're surrounded," says Thater. "It's the nature of the animals themselves that inspire the design of the piece, and their space is boundless." In the second half of her career, Thater focused almost solely on animals in the wild, and her work became more adventurous: The top floor of LACMA's Broad Contemporary Art Museum features installations that chronicle her documentation of the wild inhabitants of the Monkey Temple of Jaipur, India, and the radiated ruins of Chernobyl in Ukraine. Two weeks before the LACMA exhibit opens, the Aspen Museum of Art will launch "gorillagorillagorilla," a show the museum describes as an "immersive film environment" based on footage shot by Thater in 2009 in the jungles of Cameroon. Its focus is the western lowland gorillas of Mefou National Park, the images projected simultaneously from three perspectives. "The ultimate shot there was the gorilla looking at me with his head in his hands," says Thater, whose aim is to have animals connect with her and the audience, rather than treating them as spectacle. "I would climb this tower of 30 feet. He would sit in the tree opposite me and watch me all day long. When I left I missed him. I wonder if he missed me?"