BERKELEY, CA.- The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents Diana Thater's Red-Green-Blue Sun, on view through August 14, 2005. Diana Thater's art is heroic in both subject and scale, skillfully using technology to explore humans' interactions with the natural world—interactions that are invariably mediated. Working with a reverence and respect for nature, her strategy is to employ representational landscape imagery to create abstractions. In locating the possibility of transcendence and freedom within landscape, Thater recalls nineteenth-century American Transcendentalists.

Internationally recognized for her video projection installations and multichannel videos since 1990, Thater has a unique vision that combines literature, science, mathematics, and sociology. At the same time, her works eschew mythology, allegory, and symbolism, allowing viewers to draw conclusions and make connections.

Thater informs a viewer's understanding of how projected images are built by separating the colors of the video spectrum—blue, green, and red. For Red-Green-Blue Sun (2000), a three-monitor video piece on view this summer in Gallery 3, the artist worked with imagery from a NASA solar telescope. Capturing the flares emitted by the sun over a twenty-four-hour period, she compressed the information into time-lapsed five-minute intervals and converted the footage to red, green, and blue. The resulting images of a slowly burning and rotating sun evoke the sun's core power as well as the lure of this life-sustaining force.