Dates:
November 19, 2011 - Ongoing
Location:
Morris Gallery, Historic Landmark Building
Bill Viola is recognized internationally as one of the most important American artists working today. A pioneer of video and installation art, he is an artist whose subject matter is the profound question of our being and one that considers human life and its relation to the universe, to the soul and human spirit, and to nature and death. Ocean Without a Shore (2007), a recent addition to PAFA's collection, is a major video installation and a profound experiential work that combines a reverence for the traditions of figuration and realism in Western art with new and cutting edge technology.
Entering Ocean Without a Shore, the viewer stands in a darkened room before three large video monitors. In turns that last an average of three to four minutes on each of the three screens, two dozen people approach slowly and singly from behind an invisible wall of rushing water. They are hazy and ethereal in grainy gray tones, and as they come closer they touch the unseen barrier, making it visible as a powerful broken torrent. Stepping through this wall of water they transform into full color, brought to life before us and made present and real. There is something vulnerable and striking in this arrival, where each figure, slightly dazed and tentative in their movements, stands motionless and silent in their water-logged clothes, speaking in gestures, movements, and emotive glances that have the weight of a thousand words. Eventually, the inevitable passage of time calls each visitor to return, as if death has arrived. Sometimes reluctantly and often with a sense of peace or completion, they pass back through the wall of water, turning from living color to hazy gray as they disappear into the distance. Describing Ocean Without a Shore as “a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death,” Bill Viola says, “the video sequence documents a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light in order to pass into the physical world. Once incarnate, however, all beings realize that their presence is finite and so they must eventually turn away from material existence to return from where they came. The cycle repeats without end.”
Originally commissioned for the 2007 Venice Biennale,Ocean Without a Shore was first shown in the 15th century Church of the Oratorio San Gallo, a short distance from the Piazza San Marco. Inspired by the writings of Senegalese poet Birago Diop, it takes its title from Andalusian Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, who wrote, “The Self is an ocean without a shore. Gazing upon it has no beginning or end, in this world and the next.” Viola’s work expresses this sentient self and, bathing the viewer in a sensorium of light and sound, is a masterpiece that asks us to reflect upon fundamental ideas of love, hope, sorrow, anxiety, death, regeneration, and being.
Curator: Julien Robson, Curator of Contemporary Art
Read About Bill Viola