LACMA
About the Exhibition
Diana Thater, a pioneer from the 1990s Los Angeles art scene, creates groundbreaking works of art in film, video, and installation that challenge the conventional ways in which moving images are experienced. Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination—presented as part of The Hyundai Project: Art + Technology at LACMA—brought together 22 works from the early 1990s to 2015 for the artist’s first comprehensive museum exhibition in the United States.
Depicting a range of natural phenomena—dolphins in their fluid underwater world, honeybees who interact through dancing—Thater’s works explore the subjectivity of animals and the complex relationships humans have constructed with nature. The exhibition featured Thater’s breakthrough work, “Oo Fifi, Five Days in Claude Monet’s Garden, Part 1 and Part 2”. Created from footage shot at the Fondation Claude Monet in Giverny, France, the video’s primary colors were partially reconstructed or projected separately in order to enhance the medium’s impressionistic effects. As in other works in the exhibition, “Oo Fifi” also introduced an interactive dimension by overlaying visitors’ shadows rendered in various hues onto projected images.
About the Artist
Diana Thater (b. 1962, San Francisco, USA) draws from a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior, mathematics, chess, and sociology, and her evocative and layered imagery engages its surroundings to create complex relationships between time and space. Her dynamic, immersive installations address key issues that span the realms of film, museum exhibitions, the natural sciences, and contemporary culture through the deployment of movement, scale, and architecture. The primary emphasis of Thater’s work resides in the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality, and by extension, between the domesticated and wild, and science and magic. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including presentations at ICA Watershed, Boston (2018), Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2018), The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2017), Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul (2017), and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2016). Work by the artist is represented in museum collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, Castello di Rivoli, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
About the Program
The Hyundai Project: Art + Technology
The Hyundai Project: Art + Technology at LACMA supports exhibitions and programs that spark dialogue, inspire empathy, and encourage collaboration beyond boundaries. As a first step towards this goal, we supported the museum’s acquisition of major works by Robert Irwin and James Turrell, two now legendary artists who were members of LACMA’s original Art and Technology Lab program (1967–1971). Continuing its mission, The Hyundai Project: Art + Technology at LACMA presents exhibitions that illuminate the profound interplay between art and technology, underscoring their pivotal role in comprehending humanity and shaping our encounters with the future.
