Advanced search
- TITLES
- NAMES
- COLLABORATIONS
Search filters
Enter full date
to
or just enter yyyy, or yyyy-mm below
to
to
to
Exclude
Only includes titles with the selected topics
to
In minutes
to
1-50 of 220
- 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.
- 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.
- Inspired by "The Visitation" of Mannerist painter Pontormo (1494-1557), Viola revives the painting of the period, giving it life stretching in a time that seems, paradoxically, also suspended (45 seconds extended to 10 min. in slow motion).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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".
- Part of the Transfiguration series by American video artist Bill Viola, this short video work depicts a spiritual metamorphosis as two women choose to pass through a threshold of water and briefly enter an illuminated realm.
- Envisions an epic quest for transcendence and self-knowledge: Bill Viola describes this work as a "personal investigation of the inner states and connections to animal consciousness we all carry within."
- Drawing on Renaissance iconography and painting, and emulating an altar triptych, this large-screen video installation consists of three simultaneous projections which symbolically present earthly life, the Last Judgement and the hell, offering a contemporary allegory of existence.
- Part of Bill Viola's "Transfigurations" series, this work shows a mother and her daughters enacting a transfiguration when they choose to pass through a threshold of water and briefly enter an illuminated realm.
- Three channels black-and-white high-definition video projected into three corners of a darkened, square space; three channels amplified sound. Continuous running. Limited edition of two.
- 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.
- 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.
- The first video in the five-part digital-image cycle project "Going Forth By Day" (2002), "Fire Birth" features a figure who seemingly struggles for rebirth in a reddish orange water.
- Seating in an armchair against a stark background, the artist stares at the camera, his silence punctuated by screams. The camera pulls back to show he's at the end of a long hallway, and rapidly zooms again into the inside of his mouth .
- "Anthem" originates in a single piercing scream emitted by an eleven-year-old girl standing in the hall of Union Railroad Station in Los Angeles. The original scream of a few seconds is extended and shifted in time to produce a primitive "scale" of seven harmonic notes, which constitute the soundtrack of the piece. Related in form and function to the religious chant, "Anthem" describes a contemporary ritual evocation centered on the broad theme of materialism - the architecture of heavy industry, the mechanics of the body, the leisure culture of Southern California, the technology of surgery, and their relation to our deep primal fears, darkness, and the separation of body and spirit.
- "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.
- 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.
- In a body of water through which a light ray penetrates, gradually becoming ever more intense, Isolde's body draped in shining clothes raises from the depths, with the ray of light's movement lifting it high until total darkness.
- 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.
- In situ video/sound installation featuring color videotape playback on 25" monitor, custom-designed wooden chair with built-in stereo headphones, two stereo audio channels, first shown in large raw space at the American Film Institute, L.A.
- Presents a psychic landscape or "inscape" in which the viewer experiences the workings of the human mind, in particular, the process of remembrance.
- Exploring movement, interaction and the face of emotion, five individuals look out - time moves slowly, the camera stays fixed - as they react to some unseen horror, emote and return to their neutral poses, like in a Renaissance painting.
- 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.
- Covers a body of works about overwhelming emotions by American video artist Bill Viola: The Quintet of the Silent (2000), The Quintet of the Astonished (2000), The Quintet of Remembrance (2000), and The Quintet of the Unseen (2000).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- This work's left panel depicts - in high-definition video - the conscious self of a man sitting on a chair, waiting, though we will never discover exactly what he is waiting for.
- 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.
- 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.
- "Angel at the Door" explores the theme of the 'inner self'; a cycle develops whereby a man hears a knocking at the door, but each time he opens it, he finds no one there - only a dark void. When he opens the door for the final time, however, there is an explosion, revealing a mirror image of himself - offering a thought-provoking insight into man's inevitable and unavoidable confrontation with his 'inner self'.
- 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.
- "Catherine's Room", after a fourteenth-century predella by Andrea di Bartolo, presents scenes from the life of St. Catherine across a sequence of five screens, using contrasts of light and dark to dramatic effect.
- Video installation covering the progression of Bill Viola's work over the last forty years, beginning with significant works from his early days such as The Reflecting Pool (1979), to more recent creations such as Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) (2014).
- "Going Forth by Day" is a 5-part projected digital-image cycle exploring themes of human existence: individuality, society, death, rebirth. It features 5 video panels: "Fire Birth", "The Path", "The Deluge", "The Voyage", and "First Light".
- 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 color video diptych on flat panel displays in which a woman and a man, side by side, concentrate on ways of creating and expressing basic emotional states.
- Assembled in a former gas holder in Oberhausen, Germany, which has been converted into an exhibition space, this video installation presents a 5-part body of work by American video artist Bill Viola: Five Angels for the Millennium (2001).
- 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.
- A fully clothed male figure rises out of and plunges into a pool of water at irregular intervals. First panel (i) in the installment Five Angels for the Millennium (2001).
- "Tristan's Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall)" describes the ascent of the soul in the space after death as it is awakened and drawn up in a backwards flowing waterfall.
- Two video-art works by Bill Viola, The Crossing (displaying Fire and Water themes) and The Messenger (displaying Breath), are shown together at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in New York in the video installation Trilogy: Fire, Water, Breath.
- 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.
- Five men, in a composition that recalls a Renaissance painting, are instructed by American video artist Bill Viola to "show pressure, tension, and stress in a general arc of emotion as it enters, manifests, and leaves the body."
- From February 24 to June 25, 2023, Palazzo Reale in Milan is showing a major exhibition dedicated to the artist who since the 1970s has been considered an undisputed video art's master: Bill Viola. It offers 15 of his masterpieces on view.
- "Junkyard Levitation" is a visual pun on the concept of "mind over matter," as a man attempts to levitate while lying prone in a junkyard.
- Viola's encounters with older painting and theories of emotional expression, codified in the 17th century by French painter Charles Le Brun, led him to the challenge of showing inbetween states: transitions and ambiguous or mixed emotions.