FIONA BANNER, DIANA THATER

The worldwide debut of Diana Thater’s new work at 1301PE follows the artist’s comprehensive mid-career survey at LACMA (2015-16), which travels to the MCA Chicago in October 2016. This is Thater’s ninth solo exhibition at the gallery. The series Colorvision consists of 8 individual monitor pieces. Each vertically-hung monitor displays the name of a color along with a bouquet of flowers in a different, complimentary, color. The colors used are those of the video spectrum: red, green, blue (primaries); cyan, magenta, yellow(secondaries); purple and orange (tertiary). The word “RED”, for examples, appears with cyan flowers, while the word “CYAN” appears with red flowers. The series is based on a neurological test that is given to people to decipher the relationship between sensation and language:

_“It’s especially difficult for a viewer to think about color and language simultaneously and the dichotomy, when shown one color but asked to read the name of it’s opposite, forces a rupture between the two. The question is: Does reason or sensation dominate our experience of art?” _– Diana Thater

The presentation of Fiona Banner’s sculpture Dummy, 2013, also takes the limitations of language as a starting point. Presenting itself in the form of a re-constructed typewriter, Dummy consists of only punctuation mark keys. Writing on this typewriter results in abstract landscapes of periods, commas, parentheses and other marks. Referring to the absence of words, the typed punctuation marks express “the sense of a need to communicate in words but the impossibility of doing that sometimes” (Fiona Banner). A continuation of the seminal Full Stop sculptures Banner first created in the late 1990s, Dummy prompts a reconsideration of the very signs that ascribe and clarify meaning in written word.

Diana Thater (b. 1962, San Francisco, USA) has created pioneering film, video, and installation-based works since the early 1990s. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions that include the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; San Jose Museum of Art, California (both 2015); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2011); Santa Monica Museum of Art, California (2010); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; Natural History Museum, London (both 2009). Thater’s work is held in such public collection as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Thater’s mid-career survey The Sympathetic Imagination travels from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago this Fall (October 29, 2016 - January 8, 2017).

Fiona Banner (b. 1966, Liverpool, UK) came to prominence in the 1990s with her ‘wordscapes’, epic transcriptions of iconic films retold in the artist’s own stream-of-consciousness writing. Banner lives and works in London, where she also runs her imprint The Vanity Press. Banner is represented in major collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum; Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis; she was short-listed for the Turner Prize at Tate Britain in 2012. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and commissions at Tate Britain, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Power Plant, Toronto; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; IKON, Birmingham; Kunsthalle Nuremberg. Upcoming solo exhibitions will take place at The De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, UK (September 24, 2016 - January 8, 2017) and Museum de Pont, Tilburg, Netherlands (2017).