Diana Thater Science, Fiction

Описание: Diana Thater
Published on February 23, 2015
Diana Thater: Science, Fiction
January 8 - February 21, 2015
David Zwirner
533 West 19th Street
New York

For Diana Thater's eighth solo exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, the artist debuted a new installation, titled "Science, Fiction". Since the early 1990s, she has created a wide range of film, video, and installation-based works whose sculptural forms engage spatial perception in physical, as well as conceptual, terms. Natural diversity, wildlife, and conservation have been persistent themes in the artist's work, and she has dedicated herself to an examination of the varied kinds of relationships humans have constructed with animals. Here, Thater focuses on the dung beetle and the intricate navigation system it deploys in disposing balls of animal excrement, its main source of nutrition. Recent studies have revealed that the species uses the Milky Way to orientate itself at night, currently the only insect known to do so. In an experiment in which the beetles were placed on an outdoor table, they were only able to navigate in their usual straight line with an open view of the nocturnal sky—when their overhead vision was blocked, their movements became erratic and slowed drastically. The same experiment was repeated inside a planetarium, alternately turning the Milky Way on and off, and the animals' path was demonstratively straighter and faster in light of the galaxy. While her in-depth studies of ecosystems and animal behavior propose observation as a kind of understanding in itself, her ethical position is implicit in the work, which, while subtly political, provides views of the sublime in all its incarnations—stunning, beautiful, and simultaneously terrifying.