Claude Levi-Strauss wrote that “… art lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought.” Influential film and video artist Diana Thater took Levi-Strauss’s idea a few steps further in the installation piece documented in this exhibition catalog/artist book. The piece–created expressly for the Santa Monica Museum of Art–is based on an iconic illusion, a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Famed magician Greg Wilson performs the trick again and again; he was first filmed doing the illusion in a studio, then Thater screened the footage in the lavish, Art Deco Los Angeles Theater, and re-filmed the projection. In layer upon visual layer, using multiple points of view and multi-layered sound, Thater makes an absorbing film within a film within a film. Exciting work from an important artist.