Press Notes
"Throughout, one absorbs the feeling that one is drifting dreamlessly in outer space or roaming like a water nymph at the bottom of the sea....Tracings of light, shadows that move serenely in the background, ribbons of color that twist and diffuse like smoke...all contribute to the sense of the miraculous and to a feeling of buoyant spiritual separation from the mundane."
- Kelly Wise, Boston Globe
"Vila's painterly, abstract holograms...concentrate on inventing experiences based on optical sciences and perceptual sensations."
- Phyllis Braff, New York Times
"All Vila's work is highly interactive....The entire room becomes an instrument played by the viewers. (She) is fascinated with a viewer's threshhold for allowing the 'new' to enter. Her work contains an open invitation to the viewer."
- Regina Flanagan, Public Art Review
"(Her work) entices the viewer to look, and look, and look again. images of found objects -- many of them everyday items...along with color and light continually play pereptual hide-and-seek with the viewer."
- Alice Gottesman & Linda Donald, Village Voice
"Instead of pushing her images out of the frame toward us...Vila quietly invites us into a realm of enigmatic shadows and gestures..."
- John Bentley Mays, Toronto Globe and Mail
"Colors and images surface and then disappear. Each step brings a new surprise. And all this as if from a ghost-hand."
- Cologne Stadt-Anzeiger
"Conditions of lives, of bodies, of languages and of writings are presented as the constituents of human existence ...But ultimately the realization of the entire problematic intended by Doris Vila is carried out by the observers themselves: one must not only grasp the individual elements of the installation, but also at the same time contribute one's direct role in the immediate generation of the writing, speech, image and form of the entire nstallation -- an enormous challenge, that is implied (hinted at/alluded to) here."
- Andreas Denk, Bonn General Anzeiger
"The visitor, just like the eye-swarms and word-herds, crosses the space by mysterious rules and through conscious and unconscious interaction becomes an integral part of the installation. This way the technique disappears completely behind the art. It becomes practically invisible...impressive, exciting and entertaining artistic work."
- Andreas Denk, Bonn General Anzeiger
"Doris Vila's holograms are baroque works of dense layering, beauty and a magic that is visually seductive, poetic in imagining, and intellectual in reference. Her fragments of images, forms, and words, located within the virtual holographic space, transmit the reality that what is seen depends on our position in the world and is never fully understood."
- Richard Leslie, Art & Technology