Diana Thater's art is heroic in both subject and scale, skillfully using technology to explore humans' interactions with the natural world-interactions that are invariably mediated. Working with a reverence and respect for nature, her strategy is to employ representational landscape imagery to create abstractions. In locating the possibility of transcendence and freedom within landscape, Thater recalls nineteenth-century American Transcendentalists. Internationally recognized for her video projection installations and multichannel videos since 1990, Thater has a unique vision that combines literature, science, mathematics, and sociology. At the same time, her works eschew mythology, allegory, and symbolism, allowing viewers to draw conclusions and make connections. Thater informs a viewer's understanding of how projected images are built by separating the colors of the video spectrum-blue, green, and red. For Red-Green-Blue Sun (2000), a three-monitor video piece on view this summer in Gallery 3, the artist worked with imagery from a NASA solar telescope. Capturing the flares emitted by the sun over a twenty-four-hour period, she compressed the information into time-lapsed five-minute intervals and converted the footage to red, green, and blue. The resulting images of a slowly burning and rotating sun evoke the sun's core power as well as the lure of this life-sustaining force. Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator
