Diana Thater
You will never wake up from this beautiful dream, Perpetual Motion Two, 2005
Los Angeles based artist, Diana Thater, was an important and emerging figure in the 1990s. Born in San Francisco in 1962, Thater received her undergraduate degree in Art History from New York University and went on to receive her Master of Fine Arts from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Thater’s mediums are film, video, and installation-based work. Many of her works revolve around the tension between humans and nature, the consciousness of animals, and the duality between science and the supernatural. Working heavily with color and light, Diana Thater creates an ambient mood that feels transient and, ironically, unearthly. She constantly challenges fixed boundaries of space, dimension, and time while generating an amalgamation of an art form in-between architecture and sculpture.
Delphine 1999
Occident Trotting 1993
Delphine 1999
Moonlight Blue Room 2001
Vita Vitale, Untitled (Butterfly Videowall #2), 2008
Her work has also been displayed at the Natural History Museum, London (2009), Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2001), Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2011), and many more esteemed museums and galleries. In 2005, she received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and in 2011, she received an award for Artistic Innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation, Los Angeles. Most recently, in 2014, she was awarded the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. Currently, you can find Thater’s work at her comprehensive mid-career survey, entitled “The Sympathetic Imagination”, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago after its display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Text by Perwana Nazif
Courtesy of the Artist
Diana Thater
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