Diana Thater: the sky is unfolding under you

Opening on Saturday, April 7th, the gallery will present a solo exhibition by the Los Angeles-based artist Diana Thater. This will be the artist's third exhibition at the gallery and coincides with Knots+ Surfaces, a new work at the Dia Center for the Arts (through January 2002). Thater's work is also featured in Public Offerings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (April 1-July 29); Bitstreams at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through June 10); Arcadia at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the opening exhibition of the Museum für Gegenswartskunst in Siegen, Germany (May 6-November 4).

The works in this exhibition bring together and expand on the central themes of the artist's work, which focuses on the examination of video as a medium–both in its composition of how an image is made (the artist oftens leaves the projectors and laserdisc players on the floor in the middle of an exhibition space), and also examining the what (for example, the complex casting of both the natural world in some mediated form whether using "professional" animals from Hollywood movies, or breaking down images into the colors of the video spectrum). Thater deconstructs the technological aspects of the medium itself as well as its use of imagery, and in doing so, projects how unnatural the natural world can be portrayed, as in her installations China and Electric Mind.

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