Diana Thater at David Zwirner and Zwirner & Wirth

Artists working in video installation have tended over the years to turn away from the single screen, formally fragmenting or dispersing projections and, more crucially, engaging the world outside the piece. With Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola and Gary Hill as precedents, Diana Thater has, since the mid-'90s, been increasingly central to this development. This was demonstrated in a recent two-site exhibition that constituted a mini-retrospective of sorts.

Uptown at Zwirner & Wirth, Thater scattered video equipment, wiring and a white fluorescent light fixture across the floor, alongside a wall projection (White Is the Color, 2002). The video features a gigantic white cloud of forest-fire smoke. The dramatic white fluorescence from the floor lightened the shadows within the projection and even outshone it, which only made more tangible its delicate material existence as tonal light. Outside, after dark, black-and-white cloudscapes were projected onto the gallery's townhouse facade in pretty juxtapositions reminiscent of Surrealist collage.

Thater's more recent work Continuous. Contiguous. (2004-05) spanned the largest room at Zwirner's Chelsea gallery. Two surveillance-style videos showed, on the one hand, a Panamanian rainforest canopy and, on the other, a high crane, permanently installed in the forest for scientific research but used by Thater for her cameras. The videos were screened in the room's corners, the images emanating from projectors fastened near the ceiling on a rotating axle. Occasionally, the forest canopy circled around the room, a process that morphed the shapes of leaves as they slid along the walls and across corners. As the crane's basket rose, the cameras mounted in it caught glimpses of a nearby city. Laid flat on the floor, amid a slightly exaggerated tangle of extension cords, three plasma monitors showed telephotoed details of wildlife. But the forest looked boringly generic. What remains memorable are the projections' twin regard and the way the rotating images seemed to dissolve the solidity of the room.

Elsewhere in the gallery, A Series of Events (2003) again recalled Surrealism, as sentence fragments became word-images projected across two video screens. In Foam (1997), Thater stacked thick cathode-ray-tube monitors in various arrangements, like minimalist blocks. Oddly, her most striking footage, the recent Jump (2005), was contained in a 16mm single-screen film shown only at the opening reception, in a back room. A rare example of the artist using sound, it featured 20 jump-ropers alongside a band hired to perform Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in varying tempos and styles, including polka, in shifting metabolisms.

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