I was lying on the ground one night at an artist residency in rural Pennsylvania. There were no clouds, no smog —I've never seen so many stars receding into infinity. The sky was so clear and the night so crisp that it was easy to make out a clear outline of the Milky Way. It wasn't how we normally see it in science textbooks or NASA posters; I was looking at the Milky Way turned on its side. It looked like a dense, fat, pixelated line — like a tail that, in one whisk, could fling us out into deep space — a place capable of immense obliteration and violence, a place of silence and timelessness. It felt immersive and very far away. It was majestic.
Diana Thater's The Starry Messenger (2014), currently on view at the Moody Center at Rice University, is not that.
Nor does she want it to be. Thater is instead using the act of stargazing as a seduction technique, to entangle us in a piece that interrogates our human need to separate ourselves from a fetishized "nature," one that cultivates frustration and desire, and that challenges us to be bored. She does this by layering our experience of her piece: the meta-mediated experience of Thater's recording of a projection of the Milky Way inside a planetarium; the mediated experience of her filming the projector inside the planetarium, and the immediacy of us viewing it all through a nine-monitor grid.
On view at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston until February 3, 2018.
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