‘The Sleepers’ Exhibit Review-
Located on the bright, busy streets of Chelsea, were two large doors that lead to the entrance of James Cohen’s gallery presenting two major works by Bill Viola, ‘Moving Stillness.’ The gallery began through a completely dark hallway with grey walls leading to the entrance of ‘The Sleepers,’ one of his two pieces in the exhibition. ‘The Sleepers,’ was located in a dark room lit up by the seven white, metal barrels scattered throughout the white walled room. These white barrels consisted of around 50 gallons of water ignited by a small monitor screen containing black and white images of the faces of frightened sleeping people, from the various ages of approximately 5-70, submerged at the bottom of each barrel with black cables visibly emerging from the monitors to the floor. This instillation, in my opinion is an interpretation of shaping time as a basic factor from everyday life that has the ability to evolve through different experiences captured throughout the seven barrels. In this specific piece, Bill forces us to look closely and directly at the somewhat uncomfortable image displayed even though we might not want to, ‘looking beneath the surface,’ containing an image that infiltrates some sort of a threat entering a secluded territory of someone asleep. Bill expands on his theory of time with the gradual, slow duration of the images along with the simultaneous sequence of each image, all at the same time, in the same place, however, still isolated from one another. In my opinion Bill’s intention was to capture time or more specifically the stillness of time through images of still faces, secluded from the rest, taken during a peaceful and serene moment inside a calm, motionless body of water as an interpretation of the tranquility.
