Scarlet Macaw Crayons

Sometimes referred to as a neo-structuralist, Thater is the heir of structuralist filmmaking and early experimental video. Her preferred medium is video, whose component parts (optical, technical, and structural) she self-consciously parses, calling attention to the work’s conditions of production and installation. As with Scarlet Macaw Crayons, professional animals—animals trained and kept by humans—feature prominently in Thater’s videos. In many ways, such animals constitute her subjects as much as they do her media. Thater highlights the role that animals play, often anthropomorphically, as screens for human expectations, fantasies, and assumptions, but simultaneously denaturalizes these paragons of the (ostensibly) natural world. In Scarlet Macaw Crayons, which is loosely based on Eadweard Muybridge’s studies on the locomotion of birds, a scarlet macaw called Crayons is recorded by three cameras from three different angles as it tries to balance on a perch held by a trainer, who shifts it to and fro, causing the bird to extend and retract its wings. After filming, Thater extracted all but one color (either red, blue, or green) from each of the three videos, later combining them to make a composite image. This process has the effect of splitting the bird, who appears whole but multiple, and reducing its plumage (which reflects the color spectrum of video) to shades of black, white, and gray. The projected image registers at the center but blurs at the edges, allowing all the colors of the video spectrum to appear, albeit separately. Scarlet Macaw Crayons is closely related to and often exhibited with Moluccan Cockatoo Molly #1, also in The Met's collection. In both cases, all the media and video equipment is placed on the floor, where it is visible to viewers, and if the galleries include windows, they are covered with red, green, and blue gels.