Bill Viola’s work ultimately seeks a visionary transcendence—a way of ‘seeing’ that pierces and moves through the surface of the visual world and opens exploratory paths into the fundamental questions of what it is to be alive. His conception is of vision as a creative process in which we assemble our world and in which we are transformed by our attempts to understand our selves and our condition.

In a notebook entry from 1986, Bill Viola writes:

Vision as reception
Vision as reflection
Vision as projection

For Viola, reception, reflection, and projection represent the three modes of vision. Each program of Viola’s single-channel videos from the 1970s and 1980s presented here is organized around and explores one of these modes.