Diana Thater at David Zwirner and Zwirner & Wirth

Artists working in video installation have guarded over the years to move round away from the single shield formally fragmenting or dispersing projections and, more crucially, engaging the world outside the piece. With Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola and Gary Hill as antecedents Diana Thater has, since the mid-'90s, been increasingly central to this exhibition This was demonstrated in a new 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 mist of forest-fire smoke. The dramatic white fluorescence from the floor lightened the shadows within the projection and plane outshone it, which only made more tangible its delicate material existence as tonal light. Outside, after dark, black-and-white cloudscapes were throwed onto the gallery's townhouse facade in beautiful juxtapositions reminiscent of Surrealist collage.

Thater's more novel work Continuous. Contiguous. (2004-05) spanned the largest range at Zwirner's Chelsea gallery. sum of two units surveillance-style videos showed, on the single hand, a Panamanian rainforest canopy and, upon the other, a high crane, permanently installed in the forest for scientific research on the other hand used by Thater for her cameras. The videos were shielded in the room's corners, the images emanating from projectors fastened near the ceiling upon a rotating axle. Occasionally, the forest canopy circled around the compass 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 mountained in it caught glimpses of a nearby city. Laid flat upon the floor, amid a slightly exaggerated tangle of extension cords, three plasma monitors showed telephotoed details of wildlife. on the contrary the forest looked boringly generic. What remains memorable are the projections' twin regard and the way the rotating images appear to beed to dissolve the solidity of the room

Elsewhere in the gallery, A Series of facts (2003) again recalled Surrealism, as decision fragments became word-images projected across sum of two units video screens. In Foam (1997) Thater stacked thick cathode-ray-tube monitors in various arrangements, like minimalist fill ups Oddly, her most striking footage, the novel Jump (2005), was contained in a 16mm single-screen film shown solitary at the opening reception, in a back scope A rare example of the artist using unbroken it featured 20 jump-ropers alongside a band hired to perform move with a jerk Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in varying times and styles, including polka, in shifting metabolisms.

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