Monday 20 October 2014

Bill Viola, Video Installation Artist

http://www.billviola.com

Some of his work;
Going Forth by Day 2002
Silent life - documentary style, looking at faces of newborn babies at hospital, first light human being sees, see the advent of seeing for the first time
Memoria 2000
In version
Cycles 1973
The space between the teeth 1976
Five Angels for the millenium 2001
Man of sorrow 2001
Surrender 2001
Quintet of the astonished 2000
Silent mountain 2001
Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)

-Video installation artist
-Interested in sound
-takes inspiration from Fresco paintings from the Italian Renaissance
-Videod his mother on her death bed

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/display/bill-viola

"Viola is a pioneer of video art, and has been one of its most important practitioners for more than forty years. Characteristic qualities of his work, such as the interplay between movement and stasis, and the testing of the viewer’s perception through multiple sensations, have become recurring elements of the medium as a whole. 
Tiny Deaths was made in 1993. Barely visible figures are perceived in the darkened space until crescendos of light and sound bring moments of drama. The three projections envelop the viewer in the intense experience of the appearance and sudden disappearance of these presences. ‘The struggle we are witnessing today is not between conflicting moral beliefs’, Viola observed in 1992. ‘It is between our inner and our outer lives, and our bodies are the area where this belief is being played out.’ His works of the 1990s consistently show the body as the site for physical transformations – often through immersion in light or water – that embody these profound concerns with transformation and mortality. 
While Tiny Deaths opens up broad possibilities around the meaning and transience of existence, Viola’s recent works address spiritual themes more directly. Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), installed in St Paul’s Cathedral, and soon to be accompanied by the related work Mary, epitomises his ability to bring a full command of contemporary technology to engage timeless questions of belief. "

http://www.tate.org.uk/http%3A//www.tate.org.uk/bill-viola/martyrs


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