Diana Thater The Mistake Room

“I’m always working with multiple, simultaneous perspectives,” Los Angeles–based artist Diana Thater explained to Lynne Cooke in an interview published on the occasion of her 2015 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This statement makes sense, given the complexity of Thater’s subject matter: the networked entanglements between human and other, species and habitat, viewer and viewing space, zebra and zeal (the last a term of venery for a group of zebras). “A Runaway World” adds to the artist’s bestiary of transitory media architectures. The show presents two cruciform structures. Each is composed of four Plexiglas sheets arranged via metal scaffolding to form the prone Xs; their four sets of moving images alternately bleed into and jarringly abut each other, creating bifurcated viewing environments that choreograph the body into position, then divide and mend the gaze. Viewed from afar, the screens appear as moving images in the round; up close, these immersive viewing stations facilitate what Thater describes as an “in-between space and time that we (humans and animals) can occupy together, whose mode is instinct and whose affect is beyond simple emotion.”

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