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Bill Viola's 'The Reflecting Pool'

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Bill Viola is an American contemporary video artist. His piece, The Reflecting Pool, was released in 1979, the artwork took two years to make and has been exhibited in numerous galleries around the world. Viola’s works are known to include themes of human life, and the Reflecting Pool revolves around the subject of time, birth, death, rebirth, and memory. Viola describes The Reflecting Pool as “a collection of five independent works which, taken as a whole, describe the stages of a personal journey using images of transition from day to night, motion to stillness, time to timelessness, etc. Each work explores specific video techniques and technologies, in combination with the spatial potentials of stereo sound.” (The Reflecting Pool - Collected Work 1977-80) Viola also writes that “ the piece, The Reflecting Pool, concerns the emergence of the individual into the natural world—a kind of baptism.” (The Reflecting Pool - Collected Work 1977-80) The film begins, and we hear an engine of a passing airplane, and our eyes are fixed at the overgrown green forest in the …show more content…

We watch the man as his disembodied reflection pause in the middle of the pool, peers into (or out of) the water, bends, picks something up, and finally leaves the pool’s edge and away from our view. Later, more unrecognizable figures appear in the pool, but quietly disappear like memories over time. The surface of the water changes into a black (night sky) color, with a luminous white circular light which could symbolize the spiritual experience of dying. As the pool of water returns to its natural state, a naked man emerges from the pool, he calmly walks back into the forest, disappearing slowly down the path which he had originally come. It seems as though the man has been reborn, all his experiences in life was shown to us from the reflecting

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