Viola‘s installations and artworks invoke both primal archetypes and a mystical spirituality. The Crossing is a dual video projection that bears motifs of earthly and spiritual renewal. In the original installation, synchronized image sequences were projected onto both sides of a double-sided screen, each of which show a dark human form walking in slow motion toward the viewer. The figure eventually filled both sides of the display, stopped, paused, and was slowly subsumed by a growing mass of roaring flames on one side, and by a trickle of water that swelled into a rushing deluge on the other. In the 1997 exhibition Bill Viola: Fire, Water, Breath at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, the projections were presented side-by-side, allowing the viewer to absorb them simultaneously.

Going Forth By Day is an epic, five-part projection-based installation that addresses the complexity of human existence and explores cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. A different phase is embodied in each of the five looped projections with audio accompaniment. In one sequence, a community is shown anticipating and then fleeing from a deluge while another panel predicts a hopeful future as dawn illuminates a ravaged landscape. Each video is projected directly onto the wall of the exhibition space, just as the paint of a fresco adheres to the surface of a plaster wall. Viola acknowledges the influence of Giotto‘s fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, a Renaissance work that, like Viola‘s installation, occupies an architectural space through which the viewer may physically pass.