Diana Thater makes video installations, and her two recent exhibitions in Manhattan, one downtown at David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea and the other up at Zwirner & Wirth on East 69th Street, show an esthetic that is as light as a cathode ray. Uptown was White Is the Color (2002), a room installation that combines a white fluorescent light placed on the floor, in admitted homage to Dan Flavin, with a projection of billowing white clouds of smoke moving slowly across two walls and the ceiling. It's a peculiarly compact meditation on sublime horror, pairing images of natural and technological power.
The major Chelsea installation, titled Continuous Contiguous, was filmed from a crane in the Panamanian rainforest. Scattered flat across the floor like rectangular digital ponds are three plasma-screen videos, playing footage Thater shot of a sloth and a butterfly. Four moving projections on the walls and the ceiling show rapid pans of the leafy jungle, as well as the towering yellow crane. Here, Thater brings it all together, image and architecture, nature and electronic media, into a kind of transparent gesamtkunstwerk.