West Gates at Tom Bradley International Terminal

“ Everything we know about nature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is mediated by technology.”
- Diana Thater

Los Angeles-based artist Diana Thater uses film, sound, and architectural interventions to bring awareness to the act of seeing. Her artworks are meant to inspire our powers of observation by transforming everyday elements—like the airport’s windows and the clouds above us—into art materials. She gives prominence to these physical structures and technologies that facilitate contemplation so that we can truly feel the spaces we inhabit. It is her hope that in doing so we might experience a deeper relationship to the natural ecosystems of plants, animals, and atmospheres that surround us.

The Friendly Skies (2021) features a photograph by artist T. Kelly Mason of clouds over Los Angeles captured from an airplane as it approached the city. The installation freezes the windows in a forever holding pattern of daylight, and establishes a new, celestial dimension of space and time woven between the sky outside and the air inside the terminal. The seamless interaction of these three distinct, yet friendly, skies suggests that travelers from all around the world can bask in a similar peaceful coexistence.