Bill Viola

Artist website

Going Forth By Day

For The Quintet of the Silent, Bill Viola assembled five actors in a composition that recalls a Renaissance painting. He instructed the performers “to show pressure, tension, and stress in a general arc of emotion as it enters, manifests, and leaves the body.” Viola filmed their interpretation of this instruction in one minute in real time, but the final work is stretched over a fifteen-minute continuous loop….

Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat) almost magically captures the optical and acoustic distortions of nature. Focused on landscape, the video work dwells briefly on the snowy plains of midwestern America and Saskatchewan, then abruptly switches to the arid Tunisian desert. Viola investigates the world of illusion and how it is made…

Going Forth By Day is a five-part projected digital-image cycle that explores themes of human existence: individuality, society, death, rebirth. The work is experienced architecturally, with all five image sequences playing simultaneously in one large gallery…