Diana Thater. Space Is Like Water to a Fish

While artists often project film and video work in a black box—a theater-like setting that facilitates the suspension of disbelief, allowing the viewer to escape into the world of the video—Diana Thater illuminates the gallery with intense colored light to heighten viewers’ awareness of their surroundings. She describes the gallery space as “water to a fish”¹ because one can never wholly see it from the outside. For Thater, light is not illusionistic but experiential:

It’s something that needs to be navigated and it’s something that needs to be survived. But to a fish, water is an invisibility the same way space is to us. I wanted to figure out a way to make people aware of the space they occupy while they’re occupying it, and to see a space like an object . . . and when you go into it, you’re in the glowing light and you see, you sense, you feel this kind of fizzle of color, this intensity.²