Often compared to Impressionist painting (one critic has called her work "Impressionism suddenly drugged with Futurism's love of speed"), Thater's large-scale video projections envelop viewers in color-saturated images of nature, from flower gardens to panoramic vistas of iconic landscapes inspired by the Western films of John Ford. In Thater's work, the viewer's experience of the natural is mediated by the artist's use of technology--video projectors, monitors, cables, and laser-disc players--which the artist deliberately sets in plain view. Projecting these images of nature onto the existing architecture of the gallery--walls, corners, doorways, windows--Thater asks the viewer to contemplate not only the beauty of the natural world, but the way in which that beauty is known to us only through technology, in the end questioning the very "naturalness" of nature.

Expanding on a traveling exhibition organized by the Portland Art Museum, Diana Thater: Orchids in the Land of Technology presented the first American survey of this Los Angeles-based artist's work, including projections and single-channel monitor pieces. In addition, the exhibition coincided with the unveiling of a new installation by Thater, Nature is a language, can't you read?, commissioned for the Walker's permanent collection. In keeping with Thater's interest in the exchange between natural and manmade worlds, this work is projected from the museum's windows overlooking the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Visible after sundown, the projection links the architecture of the museum with the structured natural environment of the Garden.