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Husband-and-wife filmmakers Lidia and Alexander
Rossner, who specialize in documentary work about the
art world, attended the opening of Human/Nature at the
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. While there they
interviewed each of the artists, as well as the curators and
directors of both museums and Rare, about the artists’
processes and the groundbreaking collaborations that
made Human/Nature possible. Visit orionmagazine.org to
watch these videos and to learn where and when to see
this exhibit in the San Francisco Bay area.
B E LO W: RARE, 2008, by Diana Thater, projects shattered
video imagery from South Africa’s iSimangaliso Wetland Park.
ated by ESSA of Mexico and the Mitsubishi International
Corporation of Japan.”
What resulted is a video piece titled Juggernaut —a black-and-white image of endless and alien salt ?ats extending to
the horizon, interrupted only by the passing wheels of an
immense salt-harvesting machine.
• • • • • • •
As elephants and gira=es rambled through iSimangaliso
Wetland Park in South Africa, artist Diana Thater trained her
video camera not just on them (as every other visitor to the park
was doing), but also on the slow cars of viewers, on the smooth
black asphalt of the road.
“Art changes the world by changing the way you see,” she
wrote for the Human/Nature website. “People can change
the world through conservation, but we have to realize that
the way the world is depicted also changes the world.”
Diana’s video installation for the show feels a bit like a
shattered mirror, the images of African wildlife moving
across an uneven >eld of screens at alternating speeds and
focal distances.
