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Diana Thater in "Los Angeles"
Diana Thater makes video installations that poetically grapple with threats to the natural world. She is filmed preparing for her monumental exhibition, The Sympathetic Imagination, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
More information and creditsCredits
Executive Producer: Eve Moros Ortega. Host: Claire Danes: Director: Deborah Dickson. Producer & Structure Consultant: Véronique Bernard. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Art21 Executive Director: Tina Kukielski. Curator: Wesley Miller. Director of Production: Nick Ravich. Associate Producer: Ian Forster. Director of Photography: Scott Anger. Additional Photography: Ulli Bonnekamp, Steve Delahoyde, Rob Humphreys, Tom Hurwitz, Robert Muratore, & Gordon Spooner. Assistant Camera: Seana Carroll, Chad Herschberger, Agnes Jeanneau, Sean Prange, & Nancy Serna. Sound: Chad Herschberger, Kathryn Korniloff, Peter Miller, & Theresa Radka. Denver Field Producer: Sarah Wambold. Aspen Production Assistant: Jessica Parsons.
Title/Motion Design: Afternoon Inc. Composer: Joel Pickard. Online Editor: Don Wyllie. Re-Recording Mix: Tony Pipitone. Sound Edit: Neil Cedar & Jay Fisher. Artwork Animation: Anita H.M. Yu. Assistant Editor: Maria Habib, Leana Siochi, Christina Stiles, & Bahron Thomas.
Host Introduction | Creative Consultant: Tucker Gates. Director of Photography: Pete Konczal. Second Camera: Jon Cooper. Key Grip: Chris Wiesehahn. Gaffer: Jesse Newton. First Assistant Camera: Sara Boardman & Shane Duckworth. Sound: James Tate. Set Dresser: Jess Coles. Hair: Peter Butler. Makeup: Matin. Production Assistant: Agatha Lewandowski & Melanie McLean. Editor: Ilya Chaiken.
Additional Music | “Animals Posing”: Performed by Los Tres Pericos; Written by Mason and Mackenzie; 2M Recordings 2015. “One Duppy Two Duppy Three Duppy” by Natural Numbers; Produced by Tom Chasteen; Courtesy of Stones Throw Records.
Artworks Courtesy of: Edgar Arceneaux; Liz Larner; Tala Madani; Diana Thater; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery; Pilar Corrias; General Services Administration; David Kordansky Gallery; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Performa; Regen Projects; University of California, San Francisco; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; David Zwirner.
Special Thanks: The Art21 Board of Trustees; 3LD Art and Technology Center; Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles; Michael Aglion; Angeles National Forest and San Gabriel National Monument; Zora Arceneaux; Art Center College of Design; The Art Institute of Chicago; Aspen Art Museum; CalArts Center for New Performance; Pat Casteel; Tom Chasteen; City of Los Angeles Recreation and Parks; Dub Club; Christina Faist; Film L.A.; Forest Service, U.S.D.A.; Griffith Observatory; The Hammer Museum at UCLA; Hollyhock House; Jenette Kahn; Christine Kim; Sheila Lynch; T. Kelly Mason; Mona Bismarck American Center; Mount Wilson Observatory; Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles; Sascha Robinett; Diana Salier; Keith Shapiro; The Theatre at Ace Hotel; Watts Towers of Simon Rodia State Historic Park; Erin Wright; & Steve Wylie.
Additional Art21 Staff: Maggie Albert; Lindsey Davis; Joe Fusaro; Jessica Hamlin; Jonathan Munar; Bruno Nouril; Pauline Noyes; Kerri Schlottman; & Diane Vivona.
Public Relations: Cultural Counsel. Station Relations: De Shields Associates, Inc. Legal Counsel: Albert Gottesman.
Dedicated To: Susan Sollins, Art21 Founder.
Major underwriting for Season 8 of Art in the Twenty-First Century is provided by National Endowment for the Arts, PBS, Lambent Foundation, Agnes Gund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and The Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.
Closed captionsAvailable in English, German, Romanian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian
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Diana Thater makes video installations that poetically grapple with threats to the natural world, from the extinction of species to long-lasting environmental disasters such as the nuclear fallout of Chernobyl. Many of the artist’s works take the space where people and animals meet as their subject, exploring the experiences of wild gorillas in a Cameroon park, a wolf trained to work in Hollywood films, a monkey-inhabited temple in India, and zebras at an exotic animal farm. Adopting cyclical time signatures and extended durations, Thater’s ambient works are abstractions of time which diverge from the linear narratives humans use to make sense of themselves and the cosmos.
“Abstraction in art is the abstraction of the figurative. But abstraction in film and video is the abstraction of time.”
Diana Thater
