Transcendence and Transformation: Q+A with Bill Viola

Bill Viola is the leading artist for enacting transcendent spiritual experience through his video images that break the borderline of still photos and moving pictures. For over 40 years, Viola has been vital in establishing video as a crucial contemporary art form while expanding its scope in terms of content, style, technology and historical reference. With his interests in Eastern and Western art and spiritual traditions—Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism—Viola's work focuses on the life cycle and sensory perception.
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Time Is Not Linear: Q+A with Michal Rovner

Michal Rovner is an artist whose video art engages film, sculpture, installation, printmaking, and associates with politics, science and archeology. The main works in "Topography," Michal Rovner's current show at Pace Gallery in New York, are projected on slabs of black limestone, whose gaps, in some pieces, are bridged seamlessly by the void of slightly swaying cypresses. The landscapes behind the trees are mostly hash, desolate stony hill where groups of tiny human figures move around. At first glance, from a distance, you might think these video works are paintings or etchings. They continue Rovner's attempts to take apart reality and build her own.
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Spiritual Portraits: Q+A with Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente is well known for his endlessly mutating images that draw upon diverse sources and his nomadic lifestyle. In his current exhibition, "Nostalgia/Utopia," at Mary Boone in Chelsea, Clemente suspends time and space with 10 paintings and 18 drawings that reference Indian sculpture, Buddhist mandalas, Renaissance painting and modernist pictograms.

The paintings are imagined scenes in which represented figures co-exist with real sculptural objects affixed to the canvas. In one of four untitled paintings from 2012, an African mask is attached at the center of a radiant sunflower shedding a string of pearl tears to the floor. On another one, actual barbed wire in rainbow hues stretched across the upper band of the canvas. Below, painted eyes were tied to the fingers on hands surrounding a blindfolded head. In a third work, colorful transistor radios were placed in a row atop of an image that includes patterned quilts, Piranesi prints and crescent moons on a blue sky.
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