LONG BEACH, Calif.—Artinfo.com caught Bill Viola by telephone in his home here just as he was dashing off to Paris for a second run of his opera project, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, directed by Peter Sellars. Viola is busy these days—opening this week at James Cohan Gallery is his first New York solo gallery exhibition in five years, featuring work related to the Tristan project, as well as other new videos.

Born in 1951, Viola began working with video in the 1970s and is today among the best-known artists working in this relatively new medium; many of the videos he makes are collaborations with his wife Kira Perov. His pieces reflect a strong engagement with art history; some overtly reference Old Master paintings. (A few years ago, Viola was the first video artist to have work acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) He has represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, been chosen for the Whitney Biennial and has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world.

Last December Tristan und Isolde had a test run in Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, where it was conducted by Esa Pekka Salonen. Its official world premier was last April at the Opéra National de Paris, where it was again conducted by Salonen. On Nov. 8 it has a second run at the Opéra National de Paris, with conductor Valéry Gergiev. Performances there run through Dec. 6. The opera will return to Los Angeles in March 2007 and will travel to New York's Lincoln Center in April 2007.

The exhibition at James Cohan Gallery runs Nov.5 to Dec. 22.

There was a lot of water imagery in your work for the opera, and in your work in general. What does the image mean for you?

Death… life… time… memory… self-image… illusion… nirvana… a lot of things. I almost drowned when I was six years old on a family holiday at Trout Lake in upstate New York. It was possibly the most profound, life-changing and transcendent experience I've ever had. It was accompanied by a complete lack of fear — only calm and peace. When I think about it now it centers me again. I had no idea I was almost drowning at the time. I'd practically forgotten the experience for many years until a conversation I had with a friend when I was in my late 30s. I realized then how deeply it was embedded in me.

In terms of video, it's interesting to note that when you look at Old Master pictures in historical art museums, there are two natural elements are conspicuously under-represented—water, up close and flowing, and fire. There are reasons for that—those elements represent the fundamental dynamism of nature, and that's impossible to embody in a static form.

Unless you're Turner…

Oh yes! He got it when he was out in that storm tied to the mast! So did the Abstract Expressionists in a different way—they made the important breakthrough of equating the fluidity of paint with the flowing of time. They were really painting time itself.

Whistler painted fireworks...man-made fire...

Yes, and when you understand paint as a liquid medium, there is an interesting connection to the forces of nature, including the atmosphere in Turner's case. Scientists describe atmosphere using the mathematics of fluid dynamics—they consider it to be a liquid, always changing and flowing. When you make a video of fire and of water, the resonance is incredible—a flowing stream interpreted by flowing electrons. I was drawn to water intuitively, with a camera in my hand—drawn to its pulsing waves and undulating surfaces, and of course, optically to the images it reflected.

I made a live camera piece in 1976, when I was 25, which was shown in the Museum of Modern Art. (It was the first time my father recognized that I was a real artist.) I focused a video camera with a close-up lens on a drop of water slowly dripping from a copper pipe suspended from the ceiling. This revealed the existence of a perfect image of the room within each water drop, which was then projected onto a large screen at the back of the gallery. When spectators came into the space, each saw their own image moving within the drop on the video screen The drop would eventually shudder and fall, landing on an amplified drum and making a loud sound.