Diana ThaterAnimal Angles

red illuminated room with four projections on the walls and floor in open space gallery
Installation view of Diana Thater’s Delphine (1999) in Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015. Diana Thater Studio/1301PE Gallery.

For Diana Thater, the world of animals suggests alternative models of spatial realities from the gravity-bound human perspective.1 Her video installation Delphine (1999) features a pod of free dolphins as they twist and dive in three-dimensional movement through the depths of the ocean and break through its surface. Images projected at various angles wrap around corners of the gallery and bend onto the ceiling and floor. The installation itself, overlaying the constraints of human architecture with a volumetric space, is informed by the way dolphins interact with their environment. Breaking from the conventional filming of animals, in which the camera is an extension of a voyeuristic viewer,2 in Thater’s framing the artist and viewer look through, not at, the animal world.3

  1. Michael Govan, “More Wolves Are Better Than One,” in Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2015), 120. ↩︎

  2. Michael Govan, “More Wolves Are Better Than One,” in Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2015), 123. ↩︎

  3. Diana Thater, in conversation with Hildegund Amanshauser, January 2000, published in The Secession Talks: Exhibitions in Conversation 1998–2010 (Cologne, Germany: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König; and New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2012), 122. ↩︎