Monday, July 27, 2009

Bill Viola's The Passions


I'm on vacation this week in Arkansas. We've had fun meeting with old friends and family. It has been relaxing! I ran across an old pamphlet from a visit we made to the Getty one time when we lived in Los Angeles. It was Bill Viola's The Passions. It was a very poignant exhibition. Viola works with high resolution video and then plays back at very slow speeds. He bases many of his portraits on old medieval religious portriats and devotional items. I remember being transfixed by all of the portraits. He had a real technical mastery of lighting and videography. I saw it in 2003, when LCD screens were just coming out, so the colors seemed to really scream out at you.

2 comments:

  1. Oh, I remember these! We saw them at the Getty, too. Then, a couple years later, we found some pictures of us looking like we were in the midst of a really enormous fight. We were trying to figure out why someone was photographing us so angry... and then we realized that it was the evening we'd gone to see The Passions, and we were recreating our own with a friend.

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  2. I have a postcard of one of the water images in my cubicle at work.

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