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- This work represents the inevitable separation of father and son as they take separate paths in their life's journey. Two men arrive in the desert under a turbulent sky. They appear at the far extremes of the frame and walk toward us on a trajectory that takes them closer to each other, until they are walking side by side. Eventually they cross paths and begin to separate. The gap between them widens until they leave the outer edges of the frame.
- The video installation's alternation between slow and fast-moving images, as well as soft and loud sounds, represents faltering thought processes. A murmuring voice illustrates the installation's effect on the viewer's mind.
- In two LCD panels, displayed like leaves of a book, the video artist depicts the weeping of a man and a woman. The title obvious reference is "Mater Dolorosa", the medieval theme and iconography type of "Virgin of Sorrow".
- A group of nine people (three women and six men) are seen standing close together as they undergo a wave of intense emotion that threatens to overwhelm them. Color video on LCD flat panel mounted on wall.
- Artist Bill Viola juxtaposes personal pictures of his mother's death with images of his own son's birth to explore foundational and potent themes of beginnings and endings, the cycle of life and the movement of generations.
- In this work's left panel, The Crossing (1996), a walking male figure is consumed by fire on a 27-foot vertical plasma screen projection while in the accompanying right panel, The Crossing, Video 2 (1996), the same man struggles under a deluge of water.
- The image of a bed contains deeper psychological references, simultaneously recalling birth, sex, sleep and dreaming, illness and death. The heart is an image of the rhythm of life - the human pulse, clock, and generator of the life force.
- Seven channels of color High-Definition video on seven 65-inch plasma displays mounted vertically show seven submerged fully clothed people of different ages, genders and ethnicities floating beneath the surface of a river or lake.
- Nineteen people of varying age, race and sex gather in tight physical proximity, as a compact human mob, when without warning a gushing onslaught of water from both sides of the screen knocks them into one another and down to the ground.
- A towering wall of what the artist calls "flames of passion and fever" roars behind the silhouette of a woman until she collapses into her reflection in a pool of water.
- The sculptural video installation consists of nine scrims suspended parallel to one another. Projectors at either end of the row of scrims show images of a man and a woman walking towards each other, crossing in the center and moving apart.
- Shot at El Mirage - a six-mile long, dry lake bed in the Mojave Desert - this work depicts a man and woman walking across a hazy desert landscape. They move so slowly and from such a distance that it almost seems like a mirage. Eventually it becomes clear that they are approaching the viewer. This pair walk through the desert with the heat of the sun radiating up to obscure them, followed by waves of dust, and persist in a feat of endurance and implacability, like a march through time. Rather than narrative, this slow-paced experience suggests the artist's desire to engage with the viewer on a more emotional level.
- Part of Bill Viola's "Mirage Series", "The Encounter" seeks to investigate the limits of our understanding of the position of the human in the natural order, both physically and metaphysically.
- Five Angels for the Millennium comprises five videos projected at a large scale directly onto the walls of a dark gallery space. Each one features a clothed male figure rising out of and plunging into a pool of water at irregular intervals.
- Part of the Transfiguration series by video artist Bill Viola, this short video work depicts two women experiencing a spiritual conversion as they choose to pass through a threshold of water and briefly enter an illuminated realm.
- A fully clothed male figure rises out of and plunges into a pool of water at irregular intervals. Fourth panel (iv) in the installment Five Angels for the Millennium (2001).
- "Red Tape", featuring five short videos by American video art pioneer Bill Viola, is the artist's first of several collections of short pieces that function thematically as larger "meta-works."
- On the left screen, a young woman is in the process of giving birth, while on the right video we see an old woman in the process of dying. In the central video, a fully-clothed man is slowly moving underwater like between birth and death.
- Two naked, life-sized figures, each around 70 years old, track torches across their aging epidermises as if rooting out the pattern of their pasts. The skin itself becomes a metaphor for lived experience and the prospect of its termination.
- "Transfiguration" shows apparitions slowly emerging from complete darkness and moving towards the viewer. The bodies move from obscurity to clarity - from death to life - and back again.
- Video/sound installation featuring two channels of color video projections from opposite walls of a large, darkened gallery; custom video switching program; two channels of amplified mono sound, four speakers. Edition of 2 plus A/P.
- A man emerges from the forest and stands before a pool of water. He leaps up and time suddenly stops. All movement and change in the otherwise still scene is limited to the reflections and undulations on the surface of the pond. Time becomes extended and punctuated by a series of events seen only as reflections in the water. The work describes the emergence of the individual into the natural world, a baptism into a world of virtual images and indirect perceptions.
- Offering a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the work documents a succession of people slowly emerging out of darkness and moving into the light, where Viola's figures are like those of a modern day Orpheus.
- A four-hour plus video production inspired by Richard Wagner's oeuvre "Tristan und Isolde" and projected during the opera premiere in Paris, in partnership with Peter Sellars as artistic collaborator, and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.
- One day video/sound installation featuring live black and white camera mixed with previously recorded action performed in the same place, with a large metal pot of boiling eucalyptus leaves.
- Video art work that evokes images of dreams or a dream state, made for the 30-minute TV/video show "Dreamworks", and broadcast as part of "Frames of Reference".
- A stone building, newly restored, stands in the clear light of the autumnal equinox. People move along the street immersed in the flow of day-to-day events. Small incidents play out, affecting individual lives. Families are leaving their homes, people on the street are carrying personal possessions, and all actions become colored by an increasing tension in the community. Moments of compassion and kindness circulate within a mounting concern for individual survival. A final moment of panic ensues on the street as individuals rush to save themselves. The last ones, in denial of the inevitable, have waited too long in the security of their own homes. Now they must run for their lives as the deluge strikes with full force at the heart of their private world.
- A color video triptych shown on three LCD flat panels, "Anima" (for "Soul" in Latin) depicts three people who have been directed to express a series of emotions in a specific order - joy, sorrow, anger, and fear.
- A naked man slowly floats towards the surface of a water wall. His face breaks through the wall and he lets out a long-held breath, takes a deep breath then floats back into the blue-black distance.
- The artist's face, visible only as a reflected image on the surface of a cup of black coffee, slowly disappears as he consumes the coffee. The artist describes this action as "the eradication of the individual by self-consumption".
- A man sinks down rapidly into the watery depths, but his inevitable and extended ascension's entire sequence, which was only a few seconds in real time, is slowed down into 10 minutes of extreme duration, as if he is reaching Heaven.
- American video artist Bill Viola explores the life cycle as an enveloping whole instead of the hegemonic view of life as a linear progression. The artist considers human beings' existence on earth as a cycle where the beginning and end may be the same. Projected onto a screen more than seven meters high anchored to the floor, "Inverted Birth" depicts five stages of human awakening through a series of violent transformations.
- Color video triptych on three LCD flat screens mounted on wall where three women are asked by director Bill Viola to move through the four powerful states of joy, sorrow, anger and fear with subtlety and limited movements.
- "Four Hands" - a black-and-white video polyptych on four LCD panels - concentrates on actions made by four pair of disembodied hands reminiscent of Indian 'mudras', the symbolic gestures of Buddhist and Hindu religious iconography.
- The fourth video in the five-part digital-image cycle project "Going Forth By Day" (2002), "The Voyage" features an elderly man who is dying, surrounded by his family, as a boat below filled with his possessions awaits him.
- With a title referring to Japanese folklore, wherein things done on the first day of a new year are significant, the film - an ardent dream entirely shot in Japan - stands as a spiritual allegory equating light and dark with life and death.
- In this color high definition single-channel video on LCD panel, water falls upon and covers a female figure like, according to the artist, "something that exists at the moment and changes in the next moment".
- A video homage to Spanish romantic painter and printmaker Francisco Goya's etching "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (1799), showing flashes of a man's nightmares projected in a mixed-media environment.
- Eighteen individuals forming a narrow row are asked to move in front of the camera to look at something they would rather not see, to say goodbye to someone who'd left them, sharing their own ritual of grief with raw facial expressions.
- Bill Viola records himself taking deep gulps of air. He holds his breath until expelling it loudly and forcefully, a failed attempt to defy nature.
- Continuously running video installation: in a small alcove, a wood column extends from the floor and ceiling, with a gap in the center formed by two exposed video monitors facing each other two inches apart, mounted to upper and lower columns respectively, a black-and-white video image on each monitor. The upper monitor shows a close-up image of an old woman on the verge of death, and the lower monitor shows a close-up image of a new baby only days old. The images are silent. Since the surface of each monitor screen is glass, a reflected image of the screen opposite to it can be seen through the surface of each image, as life and death reflect and contain each other.
- A portrait of an anonymous individual's encounter with deep sorrow and loss, like it is depicted in traditional devotional icons of the suffering Christ.
- In this work's right panel, The Crossing, Video 2 (1996), a man struggles under a deluge of water on a 27-foot vertical plasma screen projection while in the accompanying left panel, The Crossing (1996), the same walking male figure is consumed by fire.
- Presents a psychic landscape or "inscape" in which the viewer experiences the workings of the human mind, in particular, the process of remembrance.
- Inspired by the life and poems of San Juan de la Cruz, a 16th century Spanish poet and mystic, the video installation presents a monastic room, with recordings of whispered St. John's poems, and focuses on spiritual search and issues of faith.
- Nine underwater portraits of life-sized figures (men and women of different ages and origins) completely submerged beneath the water, still, eyes closed, moved only by the gentle rippling of the current.
- The "Crossroads" project (in the Transit Lounge, Doha International Airport, Qatar) creates an intersection between two streams of human existence: the living reality of travelers encountering the work laterally as they walk along its length, with virtual figures pulsating in the heat of the desert, emerging from mirages and advancing toward the travelers. As they approach, each figure crosses a threshold from mirage to clarity as it moves toward the viewer, making visible their humanity and individuality, from young to old, from all cultures and races, with the endless dunes of the desert in the distance.