1301PE is delighted to present Diana Thater’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery, The Conversation, 2021.
Since Thater began working with the gallery in 1992, she has produced a number of large-scale installations involving light and video in the space at 6150 Wilshire Blvd in addition to the seminal works first exhibited at the gallery’s original space at 1301 Franklin St in Santa Monica. The Conversation, debuts a new body of work, consisting of two video pieces, as well as Thater’s signature window gel-installations. The exhibition is on view through December 4, 2021.
“There are many that I know and I know it. They are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it. Always I listen to it.”
– Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans
Many of Diana Thater’s works begin with the point at which the subjectivity of humans and animals meet. Through color, light, image, and form, the artist generates an experience with which the viewer can empathize without anthropomorphizing the natural world. In Talk to Us (2021) and Listen to Us (2021), the artist’s second major sound works, two human voices mirror each other in call and response, beginning with simple phrases and progressing into longer ones, mimicking a parrot-like voice. A third audio track of an African grey parrot vocalizing to himself without knowing he is being observed plays simultaneously as an external-internal monologue. The common misconception is that parrots are mimics, when in fact they process language as humans do, through socialization, rather than simply repeating what is heard. Like humans, a parrot’s subjectivity is expressed through its vocalizations, asserting its presence through speech and volume. With this work, Thater subverts the false notion that the use of language is what separates humans from animals. As demonstrated in this cacophonous dialogue, spoken language is indeed shared between the two species. Through her use of dramatic shifts in scale, both visual and auditory, Thater alters the viewer’s point of perception within the exhibition, creating an immersive installation that challenges the linear narratives humans rely on to make sense of themselves and the natural world.
Diana Thater (b. 1962, San Francisco, USA) has pioneered the use of film, video, light and sound since the early 1990s, continually challenging the boundaries of time-based media and installation art. Her work explores the relationship between the natural and man-made worlds while critically examining the structures of mediated reality. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior sciences, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative works directly engage their surroundings, producing an intricate relationship between time and space. Through a combination of the temporal qualities of video and the architectural dimension of its physical installation, Thater’s work explores the artifice of its own production and its capacity to construct perception and shape the way we think about the world through its image. In addition to video walls and other innovative video installation practices, Thater has been an innovator in the art of 360-degree video installation with her groundbreaking works China (1995), relay (a collaboration with T. Kelly Mason, 2007), Chernobyl (2012), and, most recently, Yes there will be singing, a sound, video, and light piece that was first installed in 2020 by the artist in a remote location and could only be experienced digitally, via a multichannel livestream video feed.
In 2018, a solo presentation of the artist’s work was presented at the ICA Watershed, Boston. In 2017, the solo show A Runaway World was first exhibited at The Mistake Room, Los Angeles and later traveled to Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul and the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. In 2015, a comprehensive mid-career survey of Thater's work, The Sympathetic Imagination, was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Over the past decade, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions that include the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2015); San Jose Museum of Art, California (2015); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2011); Santa Monica Museum of Art, California (2010); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2009); Natural History Museum, London (2009); Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2004); Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany (2004); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2001); and the Secession, Vienna (2000), Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998), Basel Kunsthallle, Basel (1996), Rennaissance Society, Chicago (1995), Witte de With, Rotterdam (1994). Notable awards and fellowships include a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2014), as well as an award for artistic innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation, Los Angeles (2011), a James D. Phelan Award in Film and Video (2006), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2005), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1993). Work by the artist is represented in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Friedrich Christian Flick Collection at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Also a prolific writer, educator, and curator, Thater lives and works in Los Angeles.
The birds in this exhibition live at the Intertwined Conservation Corporation, an exotic bird rescue run by Jenna Duarte. My thanks to her for her good work and for letting me film her birds – Diana Thater.
