Diana Thater
Flora
Flora
$150,000
Diana Thater
Flora
2020
4 monitor video wall
Ed.1/1 + 1 AP
9.5 x 250.2 x 7.6 cm / 43 ⅛ x 98 ½ x 3 in
For over 30 years, Diana Thater has explored the precarious relationship between culture and nature in her new media practice. Frequently using animals and natural phenomena as subjects, her precisely choreographed video installations immerse the viewer in ambient environments and encourage new ways of seeing the everyday world.
In ‘Flora’ (2020), a dazzling array of flowers in full bloom unfurls across four monitors treated as one coherent screen. Mounted side-by-side against the wall, the monitors display a dream-like sequence of flora: vivid purple irises become pink daisies and soft blush roses shift into golden sunflowers as the viewer becomes immersed in the beauty of a lush garden. Although the film is silent, Thater makes clear that the plants are living and moving as she flits between different perspectives and encourages the viewer to question both the place they are looking from and the space they are looking into.
‘In all of my works, I try to express ideas about time and space, certainly two difficult concepts to express in visual art, since they are not pictorial. I am not interested in making still, singular, and iconic works of art that stand alone. I prefer to think of a work as part of a larger and changing whole-as an incomplete expression of an idea about the world of time and space, objects and subjects.’—Diana Thater [1]
Thater’s experiential video installations investigate the realm between documentation and art through her presentation of a mediated reality. The artist’s non-linear footage engages the relationship and tensions between natural and man-made environments and offers her audience media that is not only visually arresting but also thoughtful, provocative, and precise.
About the artist
Thater is one of the most significant contemporary artists working in new media today. Drawing on a wide array of issues and themes—including conservation, science, animal behavior and chess—her work examines the spatial and the temporal by drawing attention to the chasm between real life and the construction of reality that her videos present.