Tigers in Eastbourne
A pioneer of film and video installation will be the third major artist to exhibit at Towner, Eastbourne's new contemporary art museum. Tigers and Other People, Diana Thater's first solo show in a UK public gallery, opens to the public on 26 September 2009.
Towner's 400m2 Exhibition Gallery will be completely transformed once again, as film footage of tigers, manipulated through innovative editing techniques and light saturation, creates an immersive installation that transcends the natural world and the confines of architecture.
Spearheading film and video installation since the early 1990s, American artist Thater has been a major influence on the genre. She layers her films over the architecture, using light filtration to create ambient and intensely colourful environments in which both the gallery space and the viewer become integral to the work.
The interaction between humans and the natural world is a recurring motif in Thater's work, her subjects often animals that are endangered or nearing extinction. Through her work she explores man's impact on the natural world, both as adversary and custodian, whilst exposing the sometimes startling similarities between animal behaviour and our own. This exhibition will consist of three films of rescued female tigers, playing in their enclosure at a big cat sanctuary in California. The star of the pieces is Zoe, a tiger made blind through human abuse. Each of the works, shot on 35mm film, explores a different way of structuring film using manual editing techniques (now largely abandoned since the advent of computer-generated images). The gallery will be flooded with amber light, creating an absorbing environment in which viewers literally step into the work, their shadows interacting with the images as they walk through the space.
Diana Thater lives and works in Los Angeles. She graduated from New York University in 1984 with a BA in Art History and received her MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California in 1990. She was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1993, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. Thater has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and America, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Vienna Secession, Vienna, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Recent solo exhibitions include Here is a text about the world... at David Zwirner in New York (2008) and Off with their Heads, OSRAM Art Projects / Seven Screens, Munich (2007). Thater received the Phelan Award in Film and Video in 2006, and was selected as the first curator for Festspiele + (the Munich Opera Festival) in 2007. Her work is held in many public collections including The Guggenheim and Tate.
Her piece gorillagorillagorilla, commissioned by the Kunsthaus Graz and the Natural History Museum, is currently on show in the group exhibition After Darwin, Contemporary Expressions at the Natural History Museum until 29 November.
Tigers and Other People will run at The Towner until 29 November.