Screening Schedule | Lawrence University

Bill Viola: Light, Time, Being

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.

Sunday, April 14, 2013 at 4:00pm—Wriston Art Center

Program 1: ‘Vision as reception’

Bill Viola - Sweet Light (1977) 9:08 color, sound
Bill Viola - Ancient of Days (1979-1981) 12:21 color, sound
Bill Viola - Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat) (1979) 28:00 color, sound
Bill Viola - Anthem (1983) 11:30 color, sound

Monday, April 15, 2013 at 7:00pm—Wriston Art Center

Program 2: ‘Vision as reflection’

Bill Viola - The Reflecting Pool (1977-1979) 7:00 color, sound
Bill Viola - Hatsu Yume (First Dream) (1981) 56:00 color, sound
Bill Viola - Angel’s Gate (1989) 4:50 color, sound

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 at 7:00pm—Wriston Art Center

Program 3: ‘Vision as projection’

Bill Viola - Migration (1976) 7:00 color, sound
Bill Viola - I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986) 89:00 color, sound