Opening on Saturday, December 11th, the gallery will present a video installation entitled "Late and Soon" by the Los Angeles based artist Diana Thater. "Late and Soon", which will be the artists first solo exhibition in New York, consists of two separate video projections.
The first one will utilize a single three-lens video projector to spill a horizontal image over the entrance area and onto the front window. The window, which the artist will coat with a neutral film gel, will act as a screen for the projected image while still allowing light to enter into the gallery space. Thus the image will be viewable from the inside and the outside of the gallery. This projection will run 24 hours a day enabling viewers to see it at any time. The three-lens video projector will be set out of register, so that the three lenses will not match up perfectly. This will make the image break down into its component parts: red, blue, and green. Thus the image will be visible and readable but at the same time multiple. What is one will break down into three.
The second projection will be situated in the main gallery. Here the three projectors will be positioned on the floor projecting backward to the rear walls. These projectors, which will run off of the same laser disk player, will attempt to reconstruct the image which is taken apart by the projector in the entrance area. Each of these projectors will only have one lens turned on, one red, one blue and one green. An attempt will be made to register the three projectors together, so that they form one complete color image. What is three will attempt to become one.
The visual imagery, all of which is original footage filmed by the artist, consists of a series of examinations of spaces in New York and California. Each space is experienced in a slightly different manner. In New York the camera move continuously through three landscapes; in L.A. the camera cuts between two urban landscapes and ends on a static shot of the city.
"'Late and Soon' is about an American explorer who leaves New York for California. The landscape of those two places is experienced in reality and in memory; as a pan or a dolly shot and then as an edited sequence and as a still shot. Movement through the land is catalogued in the language of film and is then separated by the technology of video. Only in projection does the work become what it wants to be: simultaneous, multiplicitous and resonant. The images both envelop and penetrate the viewer as she/he enters the space of the projection, interfering with the imagery and casting her/his own shadow into the work."
— Diana Thater