Color and Light

A review of Diana Thater's retrospective exhibition The Sympathetic Imagination in the Musuem of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

From the first step into the exhibition, visitors to Diana Thater’s retrospective The Sympathetic Imagination are immersed in a maze of color and light. Bees swarm across a honeycomb of artificial hexagons, scenes of the American landscape flash by at lightning speed, and strangely colored images of wolves encircle a room. Through Thater’s work, we are allowed to experience extraordinary videos of plants and animals, but are constantly reminded that we view these through the mediation of video, and our own human viewpoint.

Diana Thater began her work during the 1990s. She creates works of art which combine film, video, and installation, mainly revolving around the natural world and its relationship to humans. She is also interested in the ways a two-dimensional video can be expanded into space.

Knots + surfaces features a swarm of bees overlaid on a “hive” made of brightly colored, digitally constructed hexagons. This is a blatantly unnatural background and possible references the practice of keeping bees in man-made hives. It is also projected very large into the corner of the room. The bees become larger than life but warp strangely because of the corner. The other works on display all feature similar manipulation. In Abyss of Light, three side-by-side sequences switch between the same one hundred landscape images at differing speeds. China and Six-Color Video Wall both show six images of the same scene broken up into the primary and secondary colors of video: red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow. In Chernobyl, the viewer enters a small room in which they see scenes of nature struggling to survive in the site of the abandoned power plant surrounding them on every wall. Projected over these scenes are images of a crumbling movie theater in Pripyat (the abandoned city near Chernobyl) so that they seem to be viewed from inside the theater.

knots + surfaces (2001)

Abyss of Light (1993)

China (1995)

Six-Color Video Wall (2000)

Chernobyl (2011)

Unlike most documentaries, Thater does not attempt to involve the viewer in a realistic depiction of nature. The viewer is constantly reminded that video is an inherently unrealistic way in which to experience nature. In addition to the manipulation of the videos themselves, the projectors are made very visible in the rooms. They lie in the middle of the floor, or hang down conspicuously from the ceiling. In Delphine, the projector for one image sits right in the middle of another. Through experiencing the videos in this way, we are forced to challenge the idea that watching a video is essentially the same as being in nature directly, and that we can record situations without changing them by our presence.

Delphine (1999)

Thater immerses viewers in her works by projecting them very large in the tall ceilinged rooms of the gallery and by surrounding them in the small rooms. The space used in the MCA serves this purpose very well because of the rooms’ variation in size and the way they arranged. Many rooms connect to each other which makes for a non-linear progression. This lends the exhibition a maze-like feel, where I felt like I was always discovering some new offshoot with a new work inside. The low lighting and colored windows also contributed to this feeling of something mysterious and almost sacred.

Part of A Cast of Falcons (2000). This moon was projected on the
opposite wall of the huge room pictured below.

A Cast of Falcons features projections of the sun and moon
 on opposite walls, while falcons slide across the long wall.

Two blindfolded falcons are followed by an owl who is
 able to stare back at you.

Entrance to the exhibition. The windows were covered with colored
 plastic in order to tint the entire space blue.

By the immersion of the viewer and manipulation of the videos, the exhibition achieves a situation in which we can admire nature, while also considering our own impact on it. The use of the space to achieve this was very effective; each piece seemed to fit very well in whatever space it was in. There was a large variety of work, but it all felt tied together with the same idea. Overall, this was a beautiful retrospective which inspires thought as well as awe.