Viola is a contemporary video artist who usually incorporated a mixture of audio, visual and spacial features in order to present his artwork. His work often focuses on conveying visual representations of basic and fundamental human experiences such as birth and death, while also experimenting with attempting to convey different aspects of human consciousness and spirituality using a visual format. Viola often works with contrasting images such as life and death, or different images conveying the opposite themes of one another in order to draw attention to the polar ends of human experience, and the contrast between the different stages of life.

Viola’s exhibition “Life, Death, Rebirth” looks into the 3 different stages of life; birth, death, and the events that occur in the space between the 2. Viola uses imagery of his own mother, lain in her hospital bed during the last days of her life, in order to convey the blunt truth of death, while at the same time uses audio clips of heavy breathing to further reinforce the reality of this stage in life. The first frame depicts a newborn child, or in some cases a clip of a woman in the late stages of labor. Accompanied by the audio of crying intertwined with the audio of heavy breathing, Viola is able to merge the presentation of different stages of an individuals journey through life in a more sudden, and almost sensory overloading manner. The presence of the subject suspended in water in the centre frame is used to represent the “suspension between birth and death”, or the journey of an individual between the 2, which Viola uses to represent the majority of an individuals life experience with a single frame. By presenting a subject as broad as “Life” simply and starkly through the use of 3 frames and overlapping audio recordings, Voila is able to present the journey of life in a very realistic and blunt manner, while at the same time allowing the viewer to experience a very engaging visual spectacle.

Violas work will influence my own as I am looking to experiment using 3 different photographs depicting the journey from youth to death, with the depiction of a life changing event as the centre image. I will be taking influence from Viola to do this, as the images will carry the same concept of his work, and will be laid out in a similar way, however my images will focus less on the conceptual, hidden meaning of being “suspended” between birth and death, and more on a meaning that can be easily deciphered from the visual images.