ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY TIMELAPSES WITH HEALING HONEY FLOWS
4k Digital video, 2025, 5 min. Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa and created with support from The McDonald Observatory.
• Astrophotography Timelapses is an atmospheric, experimental art film that features astrophotography imagery taken onsite at the McDonald Observatory by multimedia artist, Virginia L. Montgomery, during her 2024-2025 art residency at the Astronomer's Lodge. The film collages together large-scale imagery of the cosmos in juxtaposition with macro-scale imagery of honey bubbles flowing across the screen. Combined, the maco-micro imagery facilitates contemplation and cosmic awe. Astrophotography Timelapses was created with support from Ballroom Marfa and the McDonald Observatory.
• VIDEO STILLS


• SLIDESHOW


• Thank you to the McDonald Observatory and Ballroom Marfa for support.

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MOON MOTH TRANSCENDS BLACK HOLE - PUBLIC VIDEO INSTALLATION AT MOODY ARTS
Multimedia Installation, 2025, 4k Video and Soundscape, 8 min. Commissioned by Moody Arts Center at Rice University, Houston, TX.


• Moon Moth Transcends Black Hole is a public video art installation on view from Sept. 10, 2025 - May 15, 2026 at the Moody Arts Center. Curator Frauke V. Josenhans writes: "The artist Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) explores in her work the idea that consciousness is not unique to humans, and that all creatures and objects are sentient beings. Drawing from surrealism, mysticism, neuroscience, and physics, she combines aspect of these different fields in whimsical and introspective projects that encompass video installations, photography, sculpture, and performance. For the Tent series, she created a live action dreamscape of Luna moths (Aticus Luna), a unique moth species that is native to Houston. The video illustrates themes of metamorphosis and cosmology through the juxtaposition of two theories, the “Butterfly Effect”—a concept within chaos theory that highlights how small actions can have large consequences—and Emmy Noether’s Theorem, which highlights a connection between symmetries in physical systems and conservation laws. The animated images are projected over vinyl decals that represent mathematical calculations depicting Albert Einstein’s Field Equations and Emmy Noether’s Theorem. Einstein emphasized the connections between seemingly disparate concepts, such as symmetries and black holes, and he stated that Noether was "the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced.” Today she is acknowledged for her pioneering work and her theories continue to impact black hole research. Through the eerie layering of close-up shots of the moths and mathematical diagrams, Montgomery combines abstract concepts and macrocosm, the close study of moths, to create a bridge between scientific research and life forms, small and big."

• VIDEO - Moon Moth Transcends Black Hole, 2025, 4k Digital video, 8 min


• NIGHT-TIME DOCUMENTATION IMAGES


• NIGHT-TIME DOCUMENTATION TIMELAPSE

• DAY-TIME DOCUMENTATION IMAGES


• SLIDESHOW

Prev / Next image 1 of 1

• Thank you to the Moody Arts Center Director Alison Weaver and Curator Frauke V. Josenhans for support.

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ELEMENTAL CURRENTS @ BALLROOM MARFA
2025, Multimedia Installation: Video, sound, photography, sculpture. Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa. March 8 - June 7, 2025.
Virginia L. Montgomery's multimedia art presentation in ELEMENTAL CURRENTS is a surreal and immersive exhibition exploring themes of metamorphosis and cosmic awe. The artist's constellation of metaphysical artworks span video art, sound art, sculpture, and photography. Inspired by her time working under the dark skies at the McDonald Observatory as an art-in-residence, VLM's multimedia presentation collages together large-scale, time-lapse, astrophotography imagery in juxtaposition with small-scale, surreal vignettes of live Luna moths, that the artist hand-raised and filmed, emerging from their cocoons into an ethereal dreamworld of blue-hues, delicate textures, and elemental sounds. Virginia L. Montgomery's work in Elemental Currents was commissioned by Ballroom Marfa and created with support from The McDonald Observatory.
INSTALLATION IMAGES
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INSTALLATION SLIDESHOW


ELEMENTAL CURRENTS PRESS RELEASE
Elemental Currents: March 7 - June 8, 2025. Marfa, TX.
"Ballroom Marfa is proud to present Elemental Currents — Material, Memory, and Myth, a group exhibition featuring the work of Christopher Blay, Laddie John Dill, and Virginia L. Montgomery. Through a diverse range of media—including sand, foam, neon and photography—the exhibition offers immersive expressions of the convergence of human relationships, technology, the landscape, and imagined futures. At the heart of Elemental Currents is the intersection of art and science, engagement with the natural world, and an emphasis on the role of technology and industrial materials within the experience of environmental phenomena." - Ballroom Marfa


VIDEOS in Exhibition, Vimeo Links:
• Stargazer Luna Moth Seeks the Moon, 2025, 7mins.
• Astrophotography Timelapses, 2025, 7 mins.
• Moon Moth Cosmic Twirl, 2025, 7 mins.
• Honey Moon in Blue, 2025, 7 mins.

PRESS
• “Elemental Currents – Material, Memory, and Myth” at Ballroom Marfa by Joseph Staley, Glasstire, 2025.
• Black Holes, Luna Moths, Marfa Lights, and Dreaming: An Interview with Virginia L. Montgomery by Mo Eldridge, Glasstire, 2025.

Special thank you to Ballroom Marfa and the McDonald Observatory.

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LUNA MOTH REFLECTIONS
WaterWork, Public Art Program, Design | Austin & Trail Conservancy at Ladybird Lake. 2024.
LUNA MOTH REFLECTIONS projected upon the Seaholm Building overlooking Ladybird Lake in downtown Austin, TX. Featuring live-action, high-resolution, macro video footage of a native Texas Luna moth, this film playfully re-envisions the massive 200ft-long Seaholm building as a delicate moth unfurling her wings over downtown Austin's reflecting waters.
INSTALLATION IMAGES


VIDEOS
Documentation:


Luna Moth Reflections, 2024, 4k Digital Video, 1 minute and 8 seconds.

• Thank you to Design | Austin, The Trail Conservancy, and AIA Austin for facilitating WaterWork. Thank you Tanya Zal for curatorial inclusion.
• Documentation images by Essentials Creative, 2024.


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HONEY MOON
4k Digital video, 02:50, 2019. Produced for Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts, NY, NY. HONEY MOON screened every night at midnight across the digital billboards in NYC's Times Square in February 2019.
HONEY MOON is a serene and sensorial short film about the uncanny flow of time. Coyly literal, the film depicts a manicured hand cradling a small model moon as honey sensually streams into a void below. HONEY MOON was shot by VLM in a single, 170-second take. The film is simple, surreal, and straightforward, yet HONEY MOON conjures contemplation.
HONEY MOON – TIMES SQUARE, DOCUMENTATION VIDEO

PRESS RELEASE
HONEY MOON, Times Square Arts
February 1, 2019 – February 28, 2019
Virginia L. Montgomery is an experimental artist moving freely between video, performance, and sculpture, and influenced by materiality, sensorial experiences, and metaphysics. Her work is feminist and latently autobiographical, and is paradoxically conceptual, mysterious, and direct. Her surreal artworks feature recursive symbols including circles, holes, and spheres.Often performing in her own films, VLM works intuitively with her camera, using unexpected props and viscous fluids to choreograph time like a material. Her hand-made, intimate videos reveal insight into liminal space.

HONEY MOON (2018) was performed, produced, and edited by Montgomery, and filmed by the artist in a single, 170-second take within a miniature set, custom-built from black mirror planes. The title is coyly literal and the work itself is straightforward, documenting a real-time, solo performance with simple materials. And yet the effect is dreamlike, with a syrupy slowness that encourages serene contemplation.

In the center of the screen, amidst a dark void, a single hand — left, white, French manicure — holds a glowing model Moon. In two bursts, a second, unseen hand pours honey onto the orb. The viscous, aerated, translucent gold fluid flows over the surface of the Moon and the fingers of the hand, streaming into the darkness below. The fingers seem to react to the experience, moving through the honey and caressing the globe.

“We live in an age that often feels more unreal than real, in which things seem to move faster than we can perceive them. As an artist, I wanted to do something different; I wanted to create a sculptural film that felt material, soothing, and real. The inspiration to hold the Moon came from a dream. There, I touched the Moon and found peace. Times Square moves so fast. HONEY MOON asks that we slow down.” — VLM

HONEY MOON is presented in partnership with Socrates Sculpture Park in concurrence with Virginia L. Montgomery’s exhibition in The Socrates Annual, the culminating exhibition of its annual artist fellowship program, for which Montgomery was one of fifteen artists selected through a competitive open-call application process. Her project SWORD IN THE SPHINX will be on view at Socrates as part of the exhibition from October 7, 2018 – March 10, 2019.

“We are thrilled to partner once again with the Alliance to bring one of our Artist Fellows from Socrates Sculpture Park into Times Square. With her distinctly sculptural approach to video, artist Virginia L. Montgomery is the perfect fit for Midnight Moment. She gives video body and density that is unique during a moment when it spills inconsequentially in and out of our daily lives. Viewing her sculpture and accompanying video on view now at Socrates with HONEY MOON enriches and illuminates VLM's evolving alternate feminine mythology.” — Jess Wilcox, Director of Exhibitions, Socrates Sculpture Park

HONEY MOON – TIMES SQUARE DOCUMENTATION IMAGES
Images courtesy of Ka-Man Tse for Times Square Arts.










HONEY MOON, VIDEO STILL
4k Digital video, 02:50, 2019.


HONEY MOON – TIMES SQUARE DOCUMENTATION IMAGES
Images courtesy of Mark Chong.




HONEY MOOON, TIMES SQUARE ARTS'
MIDNIGHT MOMENT – PROJECT WEBSITE
Additional project information with artist interview:
• Midnight Moment at Times Square Arts

• HONEY MOON for Midnight Moment x Miami Art Basel, 2024, World Symphony Building, Miami, FL



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MOON MOTH BED
4k Digital video, 6:20, 2023.
MOON MOTH BED is a surreal, symbolic, and experimental short film about destruction, rebirth, and collective consciousness. Inspired by Dr. Donna Haraway's ecofeminist writings and panpsychic philosophy, this live-action film collages imagery of real Luna moths hatching from their cocoons amidst an ethereal video dreamworld. The film is cocooned within an atmospheric soundscape of rumbling thunderstorms, textured sounds, and twinkling temple bells. In Moon Moth Bed's culminating visual sequence, a deus-ex-machina device enters the film to conjure chaos. In response, the video dreamworld comes alive with sensual flows of honey to restore peace. The video concludes with circle-shaped imagery to symbolize rebirth and conjure hope. Moon Moth Bed was directed, edited, produced, sound-scored, and performed-by multimedia artist VLM alongside her moth collaborators.

FILM IMAGES


INSTALLATION IMAGES


FILM COMPOSITE IMAGE
• Moon Moth Bed Grid I, Photograph, 40" x 26"


PREVIOUSLY EXHIBITED
• Eye Moon Cocoon, 2023, Women & Their Work, Austin, TX

PRESS
• A Luna Moth Goes to the Moon by Meg Burns, Hyperallergic, 2023



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EYE MOON COCOON EXHIBITION
Solo show, Women & Their Work, Austin, TX. Oct.7-Nov. 30, 2023.
• EYE MOON COCOON is a metaphysical, multimedia exhibition of circle-centric video, sound, photo, and sculpture work by VLM. The synthesia-esque exhibition explores themes of atomic healing via a cacophony of spheroidal symbols, serene sounds, and gentle gestures designed to facilitate hope, healing, and connection. In Eye Moon Cocoon, VLM mystically investigates two scientific theories: the “Butterfly Effect”- the theory that small gestures in the natural world can generate big changes and the “Coriolis Effect”—the theory that matter swirls into circular formations. From visiting NASA SpaceCenter Houston to introduce live luna moth cocoons to the NASA moon rocks to filming within a miniature moth-scale film-set, VLM and her moth familiars co-create a curious dreamworld from their shared infatuation with the moon.

• EYE MOON COCOON: CATALOG featuring an essay by art historian Jana La Brasca: "The Moth Effect."
• EXHIBITION INSTALLATION IMAGES:


• EYE MOON COCOON - PRESS RELEASE:
In Eye Moon Cocoon, multidisciplinary artist Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) presents a new metaphysical and multimedia exhibition designed to facilitate hope, healing, and connection. Her solo exhibition interweaves ideas from psychoanalysis, mythology, and science through a dream-like dialogue between video, sound, photographs, and sculptural objects.
Eye Moon Cocoon features VLM’s on-going examination of native Texas Luna moths and our multifaceted associations of the moon. VLM and her moth-familiars co-create a curious dreamworld of symbols (like circles, holes, spheres); sounds (like Texas thunderstorms, temple bells, power drills); and gestures of gentleness to conjure an environment for hope.
VLM's experimental movements in Eye Moon Cocoon swirl together inspiration from 'The Butterfly Effect'—the philosophical theorem that any small change in our environment, even the gentle flapping of an insect's wings, may manifest big climatic change. And, the mathematical efficiency behind the 'The Coriolis Effect'—the process whereby particles of mass are optimized when spiraling. By tapping into the physics frameworks of both theories and inserting ecofeminist thought from Dr. Donna Haraway's When Species Meet, VLM argues that our reality (inclusive of contemporary art and fourth-wave feminism) must be grounded in a philosophy of panpsychicism that attributes consciousness all the way down to luna moths, rocks, and all other animate and inanimate objects in order to neutralize hierarchies that justify oppression.
The works in Eye Moon Cocoon are devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things. They embody a constellation of textures—natural and manufactured—that exist in a floating, blue dreamscape together. Displayed rocks, both naturally eroded by the elements and stone-carved by VLM's own hands, sink into plush, blue pads of NASA-developed memory foam. Austin-area sticks adorned with little bells subtly tinkle throughout the space. And, VLM's own Shaker four-poster bed exists inside her video installation unmoored from its domestic space. In the video Moon Moth Bed, her bed operates as a physical double to the moth-scale bed, built for non-human healing. The video captures VLM hatches her home-raised Luna moth in her hand (a moth taken as a cocoon to NASA's Space Center Houston and introduced to moon rocks) and sets the young moth upon a sonic obstacle course of sticks-and-bells.
In our current era of climatic disaster and emotional burn-out, Eye Moon Cocoon invites viewers into a synesthesia-esque realm to consider the optimistic vision that there is a collaborative, circulating consciousness shared between all human and non-human entities.

• EXHIBITION VIDEOS:

1. MOON MOTH BED, 2023, 4k Digital video, 06:30.

2. LUNA BELLE, 2023, 4k Digital video, 06:00

3. LUNA COCOONS MEET THE MOON ROCKS AT NASA x HONEY FLOWS OVER EYES, 2023, 4k Digital video, 02:00.

4. EYE, 2023, 4k Digital video, 02:00.

• EXHIBITION PHOTOS:

1. POINTE LUNA, 2023, Digital C-Print, 20 x 30"

2. MOON MOTH BED GRID I, 2023, 26 x 40"

3. MOON MOTH BED GRID II, 2023, Digital C-Print, 26 x 40"

4. COCOON HOLE, 2023, Digital C-Print, 20 x 30"

5. LUNA COCOON MEETS THE MOON ROCKS AT NASA, 2023, Digital C-Print, 20 x 30"

6. HONEY MOON, 2023, Digital C-Print, 25 x 30"

• A/V INSTALLATION NOTES:
EYE MOON COCOON is a multi-media installation with a soundscape and 4 unique videos. The 1st video, MOON MOTH BED, provides the main soundtrack to the entire exhibition. The other 3 videos video, LUNA BELLE, EYE, LUNA COCOONS MEET MOON ROCKS provide visual atmosphere and contrast to the action-oriented-qualities of MOON MOTH BED. Together all four films facilitate a serene and stimulating atmosphere—as images of luna moths, moon rocks, disruptive drills, blinking eyes and streams of honey flow together.

• CATALOG featuring an essay by art historian Jana La Brasca: "The Moth Effect."

• Installation images by Essentials Creative, Juan Cisneros, and edited by Virginia L. Montgomery

• EYE MOON COCOON is on exhibition at Women & Their Work Galleryr of Austin, TX through Nov. 30, 2023.

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VLM's "PORTAL" - PARTICLE ACCELERATOR SCULPTURE AT YALE'S PHYSICS DEPT.
Interdisciplinary public project commissioned by Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory, Yale Department of Physics; 2015 - 2017.
The PORTAL: PARTICLE ACCELERATOR PROJECT was a multi-year collaborative art project between artist Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) and the Yale Physics Department exploring the material reincarnation of the Yale particle accelerator before its retirement. Working in tandem with the lab, VLM's artwork spanned video, performance, drawing and sculpture, as she used an adaptive methodology to foster dialogue between the arts and sciences, while exploring themes of memory and materiality. Post-event, the Yale particle accelerator is remembered today via a collection of small-scale artworks that are permanently installed inside Wright Labs' offices and as a large-scale, 14ft tall, 7-ton, permeant, outdoor, public art monument located outside the Yale Department of Physics. The outdoor sculptural monument is made from the original steel entrance ring of the accelerator and is aptly named: PORTAL.


VLM: How the project began: "In 2015, Yale's particle accelerator community desired to materially memorialize their beloved Van de Graaff particle accelerator on the eve of its necessary retirement to make way for new research equipment. There was an open call for artistic ideas on how to conceptually manage such a huge object of significant emotional weight. I proposed a social proposal - that Wright Lab come together to envision the accelerator via a metaphysical prompt: "How can we both engage the lab community and this 30-year-old, industrial blue, 100ft long energetic device's subconscious impact?" Employing experimental practices, we played surrealist-sketch-exercises, like Exquisite Corpse, at the corpse of the accelerator in order to collaboratively composite communal accelerator memories via drawing. One of these drawings became the template for a large, 5ft kinetic mobile that today hangs at Wright Lab. And now outside Wright Labs exists another memorial to the accelerator, the transposed central entrance oculus of the original accelerator device named PORTAL, a physical artifact oriented towards the metaphysical void of the labs' beloved massive dark matter simulator."

IDEATION ACCELERATOR 2015 - 2017.
Ideation workshop with lab at the corpse of the accelerator.














MOBILE 2015.
Mobile created as an accelerator body surrogate and filmed to explore spacial image collapse. Sound score engineered from ambient lab machines. Wright Labs' collection.

PARTICLE ACCELERATOR MEMORIAL MOBILE VIDEO
HD Video, 01:53, 2015.
MOBILE contains accelerator artifacts: 1 lucite accelerator beam rod, 3 aluminum beam rings, and the addition of a large laser-cut metaphysical portrait drawing of the accelerator composited from 3 unique memory renderings by 3 unique scientists while playing Exquisite Corpse. With one 'accelerator memory-fragment drawing' mounted to each beam ring, the mobile it is divided into 3 different parts to symbolize the diverse Wright Lab physicists who cognitively contributed to the particle accelerator's care over 30 years. It is in the permanent collection of Wright Labs and hangs in their offices over the community's coffee bar.

INSTALLATION AT WRIGHT LABS' OFFICES 2016.
Mobile, drawings, photos permanently installed inside office communal space in memorial of the accelerator.




PORTAL 2017.
Outdoor public monument and memorial sculpture engineered from original Particle Accelerator front portal. Designed to direct the gaze towards the future while remembering the past.

PORTAL Sculpture; Particle Accelerator outdoor monument. Steel, concrete. 14ft x 9ft x 5ft, 2017. Realized by Jeffery Ashenfelter, Karsten Heeger, Frank Lopez, Jim Palmer, and Virginia L. Montgomery. In memory of the ESTU Van De Graaff Accelerator. Operated from 1988-2011 at the Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory (WNSL).

PORTAL onsite installation images:









YALE FILM: WRIGHT LABORATORY

Official film Yale University produced on the Particle Accelerator. Artist Virginia L. Montgomery appears mid-way to discuss her sculpture and artistic process.

IDEATION ACCELERATOR WORKS EXHIBITED
IDEATION ACCELERATOR, Wright Labs, Yale University
things you can’t unthink, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre
Exchanges in Collaboration, New England Media Symposium, Emerson College


Special thanks to Adam Pape, Raza Kazmi and Michael Marsland for documentation photography and Erin Henry for additional support. Thank you Wright Labs' Karsten Heeger, Frank Lopez, Jeff Ashenfelter and Smedley Cranes' Jim Palmer!

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SKY LOOP EXHIBITION
Solo show, Lawndale, TX. Jan 18 - April 25, 2020.
* Exhibition Summary, VLM: SKY LOOP PDF document.
SKY LOOP is a video, sound, and sculpture installation inspired by 'The Butterfly Effect' theory and VLM’s own firsthand experience weathering the natural disaster, Hurricane Harvey. The storm devastated the city of Houston and the artist’s childhood neighborhood in the summer of 2018. SKY LOOP introduces a new direction for VLM in her art, both conceptually and materially, and presents a rigorous and metaphysical analysis of Hurricane Harvey as told through a formal yet subconscious language of Houston-specific symbols. To make the videos, VLM utilizes a combination of archival NASA footage, footage shot of Hurricane Harvey as she canoed the storm with her mother, and footage shot from her studio of the artist raising native Texas butterflies. Audiences are invited to touch and sit upon two sensory sculptures in the exhibition: a memory foam mattress containing a large whirlpool stone and her family's vintage aluminum canoe filled with Buffalo Bayou sand. The SKY LOOP  exhibition embodies the butterfly effect philosophy—the idea that any small change in our environment, even the gentle flapping of a butterfly's wings, can create big climatic change—and reveals VLM's surreal movements to render hope via ephemeral languages of healing, rebirth, and recovery.
INSTALLATION IMAGES

SKY LOOP EXHIBITION WORK
1. BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED, 4k Digital video, 05:30, 2020.
2. HONEY HEALING HURRICANES, 4k Digital video, 08:00, 2020.
3. SKY LOOP, 4k Digital video, 09:30, 2020.
4. SKY EYE, 4k Digital video, 02:18, 2020.
5. MOM'S CANOE, Sculpture; canoe, sand, 18x4x3', 2020.
6. HEAD STONE, Sculpture; whirlpool stone, memory foam, 72x84x20", 2016.

EXHIBITION TEXT, The Butterfly Effect by Wendy Vogel –
"You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby ... changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole," wrote Johann Gottlieb Fichte in The Vocation of Man (1799). With this proclamation, the German idealist philosopher anticipated the butterfly effect by over 150 years. Put simply, the butterfly effect—a fundamental concept of chaos theory—explains how small changes can have big consequences. The meteorologist Edward Lorenz first observed in the early 1960s that natural microphenomena could cause catastrophic events, such as major weather systems. It may be hard to believe from today’s environmentally-conscious perspective, but Lorenz’s research went underrecognized for over a decade. A professor at MIT, he presented his findings to students with the understated metaphor of a seagull influencing a rainstorm. In 1972, the path to mainstream credibility followed after he presented a paper poetically titled, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” Faced with the catastrophic reality of climate change, the butterfly effect surfaces again as an urgent metaphor for our times.
Houston native Virginia Lee Montgomery (VLM) draws from the evocative imagery of these theories, building a richly symbolic language in sculpture, video, and performance art. In her practice, she postulates a feminist metaphysical approach to questions of consciousness and the natural world. VLM challenges patriarchal narratives about nature and technology that exclude female contributions, including spiritual practices, enacting a humorous modern-day sorcerer character called the Business Witch. SKY LOOP, her solo exhibition at Lawndale, focuses on the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey and how a society might heal itself in its aftermath.
In August 2017, the artist witnessed the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Harvey firsthand from her childhood home in Houston. Four large-scale projected videos in SKY LOOP draw from VLM’s experience of the Category 4 storm. All videos created in 2020, the impressionistic SKY LOOP links the phenomenon of cascading sand, the eye of the hurricane, and fantastical powers of divination and healing as they might manifest through generations of women. The film begins with the artist drilling through a map of the hurricane’s eye, then swirling a pile of sand on a beach. At intervals throughout the video, sand flows through the hands of three female relatives—VLM, her mother Mary Hunnell Smith, and grandmother Lee Adcock Hunnell—who the artist equates to the mythological Fates. In a later sequence, Texas honey—long recognized for its curative properties—drips over footage of the raging hurricane captured by the artist and organizations like NASA. In one stirring clip, the artist and her mother navigate central Houston’s Buffalo Bayou in her grandmother’s canoe. VLM utilizes fast cuts and reversals, making it appear as though her whirling storm and human gestures were a science fiction narrative; she understands, however, that news programs also deploy montage effects to dramatize stories like meteorological crises.
The surrealist-tinged video BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED depicts butterfly species native to Texas—the black swallow tail, the buckeye, and the painted lady—that VLM raised to hatch on the rails of a miniature Shaker bed. The eye of the Hurricane is projected where a body would lay. Shaker furniture has become an iconic American style, though its religious origins speak to proto-feminist subversion. Mother Ann Lee founded the religious Shaker sect in the late 1700s on the principles of celibacy and equal education for all genders. Considered Christ’s female equivalent by her followers, Lee elaborated a theory that saw oppression of men through labor and the pain of childbirth as a result of the Fall. In VLM’s moving-image work, we might envision an association between the butterflies’ ‘eyespots’—illusory markings that often detract predators from the insects’ vulnerable bodies—and the hurricane’s deceptively calm eye.
Like the video work on view, the sculpture Head Stone (2016) at the center of the gallery reimagines the interaction between humans and inorganic matter. The artist invites viewers to recline on a stack of five memory foam mattresses, which also holds a found whirlpool stone. VLM considers it another healing gesture to give the rock—an ancient piece of compressed earth—a place to rest. This stone, after all, has witnessed centuries of upheaval. And as Fichte would tell us, one morsel of dirt can change the course of history."—Writer Wendy Vogel, The Butterfly Effect, 2020."


EXHIBITION NOTES
SKY LOOP is an immerse, multi-media installation with four unique videos. The 1st video, BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED, provides the main soundtrack to the entire exhibition. The 2nd video, SKY LOOP, named after the exhibition, contains a minimal soundtrack of field recordings from Houston's Buffalo Bayou ecosystem; these recordings interject at random. The 3rd film, HONEY HEALING HURRICANES, and the 4th film, SKY EYE, are both silent and simple films; these two films provide visual atmosphere and tonal contrast to the conceptually-dense make-up of the main films, BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED, and, SKY LOOP. In totality, all four films facilitate a serene, yet energetic, atmosphere—as images of hurricanes, butterflies, eyes, honey flow together with a healing soundtrack of bells to wash over the SKY LOOP experiencer.

PDF of SKY LOOP Exhibition
* Exhibition Summary, VLM:SKY LOOP, for .PDF download.

SKY LOOP is on exhibition at the Lawndale Art Center of Houston, TX through April 25, 2020. The gallery is open Tuesday - Sunday, 12pm - 6pm. Please visit Lawndale for additional information.

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DREAM COCOON EXHIBITION
Solo show, HESSE FLATOW. Oct 22 - Nov 21, 2020.
508 W. 26th St., Suite #5G, New York, NY.
PRESS RELEASE — Hesse Flatow is pleased to present Virginia L. Montgomery's DREAM COCOON, a multi-media exploration of metaphysical feminist panpsychicism through sculpture, performance, and film. Virginia Lee Montgomery (VLM) exhibits a series of marble ponytail sculptures, made after ambiguously erotic shapes of primordial protozoa, and a dream-logica film: BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED. During the pandemic, VLM began obsessively stone-carving and raising moths and butterflies as a way to both investigate transfiguration and to explore themes such as interiority, healing, and emergence. In DREAM COCOON, butterflies symbolize hope and stones provide grounding. VLM's sensually ambiguous Marble Ponytail sculptures ask us to remember that "ponytail" forms first appeared on Earth not as phalluses, but as protozoa--unicellular, multi-sexed, parasitic organisms--not unlike our own evolutionary ancestors. The sculptures reject the psychoanalytic categorization of the ponytail form as a "phallus", and instead position the ponytail form in psychic community with ancient rites, bone, hair, protozoa, and the metaphysical dynamics of atoms in motion. Each is hand-carved, polished, and sculpted by the artist and named in honor of an ancient deity, i.e. Epona (Gaulish Goddess of Horses), Aluna (Cajun Goddess of the Moon), or Andromeda (Grecian Goddess of Dreams). • "Each Marble Ponytail eventually collapses under the weight of its own linear erection. This is to show that as the Marble Ponytail form evolves it becomes an arc, or succumbs to Coriolis forces of molecular motion, before its atoms find equilibrium in the physical position of an ovoid." —VLM • By contemporarily sculpting in a prehistoric medium like stone, VLM summons sculpture's metaphysical function as a tool for funerary, fertility, and healing rites. VLM's video installation will be shown with her marble-on-memory-foam sculpture, MARBLE EGG, extending her investigation into the relationship between physical (material) and psychic (mental) structures.
VIRTUAL TOUR VIDEO

INSTALLATION IMAGES

DREAM COCOON EXHIBITION WORK
1. BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED, 4k Digital video, 05:30, 2020
2. MARBLE EGG, Marble, memory foam, 72x84x20", 2020
3. MARBLE PONYTAIL, ALUNA, Marble, string, 26x3x3", 2020
4. MARBLE PONYTAIL, ANDROMEDA, Marble, string, 24x5x4", 2020
5. MARBLE PONYTAIL, ARTEMIS, Marble, string, 25x5x4", 2020
6. MARBLE PONYTAIL, AURORA, Marble, string, 25x5x4", 2020
7. MARBLE PONYTAIL, AYANA, Marble, string, 25x5x4", 2020
8. MARBLE PONYTAIL, DIONE, Marble, string, 25x3x1.5", 2020
9. MARBLE PONYTAIL, EPONA, Marble, string, 25x5x4", 2020
10. MARBLE PONYTAIL, MEDUSA, Marble, string, 26x3x3", 2020
11. META LUNA, PROFILE, Photograph, 26x40, 2020
12. META LUNA, 3/4 ANGLE, Photograph, 26x40, 2020
13. META LUNA, PORTRAIT, Photograph, 26x40, 2020

META LUNA PHOTOGRAPH SERIES


VLM: DREAM COCOON
Solo show, HESSE FLATOW, NY. Oct 22 - Nov 21, 2020.
508 W. 26th St., Suite #5G, New York, NY
Gallery open Tuesday - Sunday, 11am - 6pm.
Visit www.hesseflatow.com to schedule an appointment

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MARBLE PONYTAIL SCULPTURES
MARBLES PONYTAILS created for DREAM COCOON, NY, 2020.
VLM's sensually ambiguous Marble Ponytail sculptures ask us to remember that "ponytail" forms first appeared on Earth not as phalluses, but as protozoa--unicellular, multi-sexed, parasitic organisms--not unlike our own evolutionary ancestors. The sculptures reject the psychoanalytic categorization of the ponytail form as a "phallus", and instead position the ponytail form in psychic community with ancient rites, bone, hair, protozoa, and the metaphysical dynamics of atoms in motion. Each is hand-carved, polished, and sculpted by the artist and named in honor of an ancient deity, i.e. Epona (Gaulish Goddess of Horses), Aluna (Cajun Goddess of the Moon), or Andromeda (Grecian Goddess of Dreams). By contemporarily sculpting in a prehistoric medium like stone, VLM summons sculpture's metaphysical function as a tool for funerary, fertility, and healing rites.
MARBLES PONYTAIL SCULPTURES
1. MARBLE PONYTAIL, ALUNA, Marble, string, 26x3x3"
2. MARBLE PONYTAIL, ANDROMEDA, Marble, string, 24x5x4"
3. MARBLE PONYTAIL, ARTEMIS, Marble, string, 25x5x4"
4. MARBLE PONYTAIL, AURORA, Marble, string, 25x5x4"
5. MARBLE PONYTAIL, AYANA, Marble, string, 25x5x4"
6. MARBLE PONYTAIL, DIONE, Marble, string, 25x3x1.5"
7. MARBLE PONYTAIL, EPONA, Marble, string, 25x5x4"
8. MARBLE PONYTAIL, MEDUSA, Marble, string, 26x3x3"


"Each Marble Ponytail eventually collapses under the weight of its own linear erection. This is to show that as the Marble Ponytail form evolves it becomes an arc, or succumbs to Coriolis forces of molecular motion, before its atoms find equilibrium in the position of an ovoid." — VLM


MARBLE PONYTAIL - INSTALL IMAGES
Exhibition, Dream Cocoon, at HESSE FLATOW, NY, NY, October 22 - November 21, 2020. 508 W. 26th St, #5G, NY, NY, 10001.


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WATER WITCHING
HD video. 07:06. 2018.
Commissioned by The Hessel Museum of Art, An unbound know in the wind, Curator Alison Karasyk, CCS Bard.
WATER WITCHING is a metaphysical short film about conjuring the strength to weather chaos. Interrelating concerns of climate, weather, gender, and destruction, WATER WITCHING explores how agency may be conjured as a kind of internal resource via divination amidst political adversity. Woven from archival footage, glitch frequencies, and the artist’s performative gestures, the work's sound is composed from field recordings of water, wind, machines, animals, and human protest to wield a dream that may cut across narratives of linearity. Commissioned for AN UNBOUND KNOT IN THE WIND, CCS Bard - Hessel Museum, Curator Alison Karasyk. Film, performance, and original sound score by the artist.


EXHIBITION HISTORY & DOCUMENTATION
• An unbound knot in the wind, Curator Alison Karasyk, CCS Bard, Hessel Museum of Art, Hudson, NY, USA, 2018.
• Towards the Last Unicorn, Curator Catarina Vaz, Art Research Map, 55SP, São Paulo, Brazil, 2019.
• VLM: SCREENS SERIES, Curator Kate Wiener, New Museum, New York, NY, USA, 2019.






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WITCH HUNT EXHIBITION
European museum group exhibition, KUNSTHAL CHARLOTTENBORG, Copenhagen, Denmark from November 7, 2020—January 17, 2021. Curated by Alison Karasyk and Jeppe Ugelvig. Museum information here.
PRESS RELEASE — At a time of global unrest, as the politics of commemoration are in question, Witch Hunt suggests the need to revisit seemingly distant histories and proposes new imaginaries for remembering and representation. The exhibition presents work from internationally-renowned artists who, through research and dialogues with leading scholars, dive into the social, gendered, and geopolitical layers of the witchcraft trials. Along with existent artworks and original archival material from the period, the exhibition investigates how specific threads of the Nordic witch hunts, particularly relating to identity, cartography, climate, and systems of power, reverberate today. The participating artists explore discriminatory fear and hatred as it spreads from both the bottom up and the top down—between neighbors onto larger communities and from governments to other political institutions, questioning how such narratives are often written out of history. Artists include Pia Arke, La Vaughn Belle, Anna Betbeze, Louise Bourgeois, Youmna Chlala, Keviselie (Hans Ragnar Mathisen), Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Reba Maybury, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Sandra Mujinga, Rasmus Myrup, New Noveta, Carol Rama, Máret Ánne Sara, Aviva Silverman, Angela Su, Carmen Winant, Cecilia Vicuña. Witch Hunt is curated by Alison Karasyk and Jeppe Ugelvig.
—
VLM ARTWORKS IN 'WITCH HUNT' —
• WATER WITCHING, Video; 4k Digital Video, Stereo sound, 07:06, 2018
• HEADSTONE II, Sculpture; Danish Bornholm stone, memory foam, 72 x 84 x 20", 2020
—
VLM INSTALLATION IMAGES FOR 'WITCH HUNT' —


WITCH HUNT
KUNSTHAL CHARLOTTENBORG
November 7, 2020 - January 17, 2021
Kongens Nytorv 1, 1050 København K, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Visit www.kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk.

VLM: WITCH HUNT EXHIBITION
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BUSINESS WITCH ESSAY
BUSINESS WITCH is an essay written and narrated by artist Virginia L. Montgomery for the museum catalog, "Day Jobs," curated by Veronica Roberts. VLM's essay discusses her surreal life working as both a professional mind-map scribe and as a multimedia artist who raises luna moths. In her essay, VLM discusses how her professional mind-mapping influences her personal art practice. She explores how using symbols allows her to craft her own conceptually-driven, surrealist dreamworlds filled with witchy, femme symbols like circles, holes, luna moths, and butterflies.
- Essay written and performed by VLM, 2024
- Audio recorded and edited by Alistar Lingren
- Purchase Day Jobs catalog via Radius Books

• Day Jobs | Cantor Arts, Stanford University | March 6 - July 21, 2024
• "Day Jobs examines the overlooked impact of day jobs on the visual arts. Success for artists is often measured by their ability to quit a day job and focus full time on their practice. Yet these jobs can often spur creative growth by providing artists with new materials and methods, hands-on knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic investigation, or a predictable paycheck and structure that enable unpredictable ideas.⁠"
⁠• Artists: Emma Amos, Richard Artschwager, Genesis Belanger, Larry Bell, Gretchen Bender, Sara Bennett, Gregory Blackstock, Mark Bradford, Violette Bule, Jim Campbell, Lenka Clayton, Marsha Cottrell, Jeffrey Gibson, Jay Lynn Gomez, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Tishan Hsu, Tom Kiefer, Margaret Kilgallen, Barbara Kruger, Ahree Lee, Nate Lewis, Sol LeWitt, Vivian Maier, Robert Mangold, Narsiso Martinez, Allan McCollum, Virginia L. Montgomery, Ragen Moss, Howardena Pindell, Chuck Ramirez, Manuel A. Rodríguez-Delgado, Sandy Rodriguez, James Rosenquist, Robert Ryman, Julia Scher, Lillian Schwartz, Frank Stella, Ricardo Valverde, Andy Warhol

• Edited by Veronica Roberts
• Foreword by Lucy R. Lippard
• Texts by Francesca Balboni, Sarah C. Bancroft, Meg Burns, Jenny Dally, Lynne Maphies, Aja Edwin Mujinga, Kenta Murakami, Rebekah Rutkoff, and Jorge Eduardo Sibaja

• Essay Transcription
"Business Witch" By Virginia L. Montgomery
Business Witch is what I call her, but she is me. I’m Virginia L. Montgomery, a video artist, sound artist, sculptor, and professional mind-map scribe. Business Witch is my name for the mysterious workingwoman persona I portray in my artwork: a ponytailed problem-solver who transforms ideas into reality. She is based upon my real-life experience working as a graphic facilitator—a career in which I travel North America diagramming the development of ideas during brainstorming meetings, DEI workshops, and public conferences like TED Talks .

In my work as a fine artist, I turn my “mind-map scribing” skillset inward to render the contours of my own dreams and memories. The output is my video artwork: a psychic terrain of material experimentation with revolving drills, digital glitches, and dripping liquids that together congeal, and reveal, new insights. I have worked as a graphic facilitator for the past decade, standing on stages before audiences of thousands to translate ideas from global thought leaders into infographic whiteboard murals. Any given Monday through Friday, I may work at a conference in Atlanta, Las Vegas, or San Francisco. While now based in Texas, I began my career as a graphic facilitator in New York during my mid-twenties, after I worked at a Manhattan innovation consulting agency as creative producer (As a side note, because I exist at the intersection of “artist” and “millennial,” I’m experienced in the art of making do. I embraced that agency position as both a recent BFA graduate and restless job-seeker during the 2008 recession).

The field of graphic facilitation is international and spans nearly fifty years, though it was in 2012, while I worked at an innovation agency, that a Mad Men–esque focus group introduced me to the skillset. 1 Entranced, I pivoted. By 2013, I was an apprentice scribe at a boutique Brooklyn-based graphic facilitation company. And thus began my Business Witch lifestyle: black suits, weekly travel, marker-stained fingers, and a distinct diet of conference catering staples like cheese Danishes. After hours, my hotel room became my art studio. I began to document the interiors of my hotel rooms alongside uncanny objects I’d bring from home, like my three-foot blonde ponytail prop, my Dewalt power drill, and luna cocoons .

As a metaphysical artist, I am always mapping the boundary between thing and theory with symbols. For over a decade, I have reverse-engineered business brainstorming devices to conjure new strategies for creating video art. For example, when I compose a storyboard for a video, I repurpose the same out-of-the-box brainstorming strategies used to ideate upon satellites, sportswear, or software to ask, “What’s it like to be a luna moth?”

To answer this question, I cast an array of nonhuman collaborators—from ponytails to pastries, syrups to stones, moths to machines.2 Next, I expand my query. I set my camera to document the unexpected choreographies of these collaborators, as absurd as the premise may be, i.e., “What’s it like to emerge from a cocoon as a luna moth only to find oneself inside a blonde ponytail resting upon a hotel bed?” This question informs my video Pony Cocoon. Pony Cocoon is a surreal video encapsulated inside an intimate dreamworld of gesture, texture, and sound. Interweaving themes of psychology, entomology, and awakening, the video features my working-woman alter ego, Business Witch, alongside a luna moth emerging from a disembodied ponytail (PAGE 232). In a sunny hotel suite, Business Witch performs a callisthenic exercise routine amid field recordings of thunderstorms to summon her portal-making power drill. Once the drill penetrates the filmic fourth wall, the video abruptly cuts away to macro footage of a writhing luna moth shedding her cocoon. Both protagonists in Pony Cocoon—moth and human—use their bodies as apparatuses for agency-making to engender transformation. As an artist, it is important for me to have agency in every aspect of my creative process—from conceptual conceit to physical production. This includes every step in a project’s creation, from the empathic care needed to hand-raise moths and butterflies, to a video’s storyboarding, filming, editing, and sound-scoring. The ethics behind how an artwork is made are just as important to me as the final artwork itself.

Collectively, these elements reveal a metaphysical engagement of consciousness through labor, crafting a cocoon of authenticity via many intentional actions. The business of Business Witch is the business of storytelling with symbols. As a scribe, I do three things simultaneously: listen for big ideas, synthesize them, and draw key insights. For example, to scribe and symbolize the phrase “draw key insights,” I would render a graphic of a pencil that draws a key that unlocks a lightbulb. In turn, this pencil-key-lightbulb graphic would serve as a teaching device, memory tool, and a record of the idea itself. My videos function the same way. A multilayered approach to symbolic communication not only activates our deepest memory sectors but also reveals the poetics of the mind. In my art, there is a symbolic structure at play. Most of my videos contain recurring visual motifs, gestures, and sounds. In my video dreamscapes, power tools assume a yonic quest for destruction, and honey symbolizes an urge to soothe and heal. Repeatedly, images of holes occur in my videos. This is intentional.

I believe that every hole is a portal for something hopeful to appear. In both my labors as graphic facilitator and artist, I engage ideation, ask questions, and find solutions through symbols. The practical magic of symbols is that they allow us to go beyond what is known or what can be seen. Symbols create cognitive linkages between otherwise very different concepts and experiences—producing within us the power to access the inner workings of our own mysterious minds.
- VLM, 2024


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SWORD IN THE SPHINX
Sculpture; resin, steel, rust, concrete, enamel. 42 x 14 x 108 inches. 2018. Commissioned by Socrates Sculpture Park, NY. Oct 2018 - March 2019. Curator Jess Wilcox.
SWORD IN THE SPHINX is an enigmatic public sculpture. The outdoor artwork includes a resin-cast copy of a historical French garden sphinx in the likeness of the 18th century court mistress, Madame de Pompadour, impaled with a hand-forged, artist-smithed sword. The work is installed in Socrates' far-left garden gazing towards New York City.


CURRENTLY ON EXHIBITION
• THE SOCRATES ANNUAL, Curator Jessica Wilcox, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, 2018. October 2018 - March 2019.

THANK YOU
• The sword is an authentic 4-part estoc crusade sword. It was forged and made with bladesmith Nick Anger of Anger Knives in Johnson, VT. Thank you Nick.
• The pedestal was constructed with Sara Coffin of Coffin Levine. Thank you Sara.
• Thank you Curator Jess Wilcox for the inclusion, Chris Zirbes for the technical advice, and all of Socrates Sculpture Park for the opportunity to exhibit and work in residence as a 2018 - 2019 Fellow.



NOTES
• See SWORD IN THE SPHINX's companion video CUT COPY SPHINX for additional context

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SKY LOOP FILM COMPOSITE
The SKY LOOP - FILM COMPOSITE video recreates the immersive affect of experiencing the 4 different SKY LOOP films screened together, akin to how the 4 films were initially exhibited as a single installation. Each film is unique, yet when seen together, the films reveal a shared symbolic language of hope. For more information: SKY LOOP & SKY LOOP Exhibition PDF.
VIDEOS
1. SKY EYE, Video, 02:18, 2020. Top left.
2. BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED, Video, 05:30, 2020. Top right.
3. HONEY HEALING HURRICANES, Video, 8:00, 2020. Lower left.
4. SKY LOOP, Video, 09:30, 2020. Lower right.

SKY LOOP is an immersive, four-channel film and sculpture installation exploring VLM's firsthand experience weathering Hurricane Harvey from a metaphysical feminist perspective. The installation interweaves video imagery of whirling hurricanes mediated by healing flows of honey, textured bayou sand sifting between the hands of Houston women, and poetic scene where Texas butterflies, placed over the image of hurricane, emerge to conjure a "Butterfly Effect" of positive climatic change. The exhibition also includes two interactive sculptures. Visitors are encouraged to sit beside a 100lb whirlpool stone suspended by a large pad of blue memory-foam or climb into VLM's vintage family canoe, as she did with her mother, during Hurricane Harvey's wake. In totality, SKY LOOP facilitates a swirling contemplation of hurricanes, hope, and healing.
FILM STILLS

INSTALL IMAGES

See SKY LOOP for additional information.


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PONY COCOON
4k Digital video, 05:05, 2019.
PONY COCOON is a serene, short film about Business Witch and the cryptic birth of a luna moth from a disembodied ponytail. Encapsulated in an intimate dreamworld of gesture, texture, and sound, the film interweaves themes of psychology, entomology, and awakening.

In PONY COCOON, two doppelgängers are at work: Business Witch and the luna moth. Both protagonists use their bodies as apparatuses for mark-making to burrow out of containment. Shot in high definition macro footage in color palette of soft pastels, the dreamlike narrative of the film references the classical Greek myth of Psyche, the laboring butterfly wing goddess. Psyche is also the Greek word for 'spirit' and serves as the etymological basis for 'Psychology'. In the film’s opening and closing moments, a metaphysical dynamic emerges: the video screen drips with real honey as both protagonists emerge onscreen. Symbolically, the film is also an analysis of labor. Half of the film footage in PONY COCOON was shot by VLM in a hotel room during a real business trip while the other half of PONY COCOON was shot in the artist's studio as she raised the moth in the film. The PONY COCOON soundscape is original and was constructed by the artist from field recordings of Texas thunderstorms, wind chimes, corporate hotel rooms, and a Dewalt dril. PONY COCOON was scored, edited, produced, and preformed by VLM, 2019.

PONY COCOON - FILM IMAGES





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MARBLE PONYTAIL
MARBLE PONYTAIL I
Sculpture; stone, string. 15 " x 5" x 3", 2019.
Hand-carved marble ponytail with a lustrous and smooth surface. Created by VLM onsite at the historic West Rutland Marble Quarry on a fellowship through The Vermont Carving Studio and Sculpture Center. It is a counter-point object to MARBLE PONYTAIL II; MARBLE PONYTAIL I is smaller because it is erect.


MARBLE PONYTAIL II
Sculpture; stone, string. 35 " x 5" x 3", 2019.
Hand-carved marble ponytail with a lustrous and smooth surface. Counter-point object to MARBLE PONYTAIL I; MARBLE PONYTAIL II is larger because it is sleeping.

DETAIL IMAGES




EXHIBITION HISTORY
• PONY COCOON at False Flag, Queens, New York, NY, 2019. Feb 23 - Feb March 24 2019.


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VESTAL VIRGIN VENGEANCE
4k Digital video, 3:40, 2024.
VESTAL VIRGIN VENGEANCE is a surreal, symbolic, and sculptural art-film inspired by the film-theory idea of "the gaze," the Vestal Virgins, and the contentious state of women's healthcare in Texas today. The film was created in response to the tragic 2024 deaths of Texas women Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain, who each died due Texas’s unjust abortion ban—a policy which prohibits Texas women from receiving life-saving healthcare amidst miscarriages. In her film, VLM facilitates a hands-on material inquiry into myth, destruction, and healing. Through a surrealist lens, Vestal Virgin Vengeance channels the protective powers of The Vestal Virgins, an all-women pagan cult active in 2nd century Rome, who were renowned for their mysterious rites, supernatural abilities, and commitment to sisterhood. The film, Vestal Virgin Vengeance, is an experimental, non-narrative live-action work. It was shot en plein aire on a miniature prop-set outfitted with cut-out imagery of the famed 19th c. sculpture of a veiled Vestal by Raffaelo Moniti, the artist's own Dewalt® power drill, and a gallon of honey. In the dream-logica structure of the film, the artist's Dewalt® power drill symbolizes the aggression of femme revolution, whereas the flows of sweet honey symbolize the critical need for healing, soothing, and care. The film's elemental soundscape features a unique sonic blend of Texas bird songs, weather systems, and mechanical power drills, to facilitate a synesthesiac experience. Collectively, Vestal Virgin Vengeance syncs together themes from feminism, metaphysics, and image theory, to channel the precarious "unreality" of living amidst this strange moment in time. Vestal Virgin Vengeance was directed, edited, produced, and performed by the artist. The soundscape is original and is the artist's own.

FILM IMAGES


PRESS
• Vestal Virgin Vengeance by Virginia L. Montgomery at Ivester Gallery by Austin Chronicle, 2024



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CUT COPY SPHINX
4k Digital video, 03:30, 2018.
CUT COPY SPHINX is a surreal, sculptural short art-film about metaphysics, myth, and destruction. A feminist twist on the classical myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, CUT COPY SPHINX recasts the sphinx as the uncanny hero who endures 'cuts' across time. Shot en plein aire on a miniature prop-set with a Dewalt drill and a gallon of honey, CUT COPY SPHINX syncs philosophy, feminism, and image theory. The film is directed, edited, and scored by VLM.


EXHIBITIONS
• Screens Series: Virginia L. Montgomery, Curator Kate Wiener, New Museum, NY. Open through 03/03/2019.
• The 2018 - 2019 Socrates Annual, Curator Jess Wilcox, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. Open through 03/14/2019.

NOTES
• See CUT COPY SPHINX's companion sculpture, SWORD IN THE SPHINX, for additional context

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PONY COCOON AT FALSE FLAG
Solo show, False Flag, NY
Feb 23 - March 24, 2019
PRESS RELEASE –False Flag presents, PONY COCOON, a selection of new work by VLM. Working across video, sculpture, & performance, VLMinterrogates the relationship between physical & psychic structures. Conceived, scored, edited, produced, & performed in its entirety by the artist, the show’s titular video piece, PONY COCOON, employs an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary to conjure a surreal yet familiar dreamscape. Populated by VLM’s ‘Business Witch’ persona, a luna moth, & a ponytail, the film unpacks a range of cultural associations related to the butterfly: from joyful transformation to deathly harbinger. The original soundscape is composed from field recordings of Texas thunderstorms, corporate conference hotels, a Dewalt drill, & a single moth emerging from a cocoon. Three meticulously polished marble sculptures extend motifs of the projected video into immediate, tangible form. Carved from the same aesthetic language, they are paradoxically cryptic & literal, conceptual & hand-built. Created by VLM at the historic West Rutland Marble Quarry (during a fellowship at The Vermont Carving Studio and Sculpture Center), they serve both as uncanny totems & material embodiments of the familiar. PONY COCOON furthers Virginia Lee Montgomery’s enduring inquiry into the link between material & mind - expanding its scale & context. Her alchemical voice is both idiosyncratic & clear. Through her unexpected fusion of references, symbols, & histories, VLM offers a singularly cerebral & seductive vision.

EXHIBITION IMAGES



EXHIBITION WORKS
• PONY COCOON. Digital 4k video; 05:05, 2019.
• MARBLE PONYTAIL I. Sculpture; Stone, string. 15" x 3" x 15", 2019.
• MARBLE PONYTAIL II. Sculpture; Stone, string. 35" x 5" x 35", 2019.
• MARBLE PONYTAIL II. Sculpture; Stone, string. 35" x 5" x 35", 2019.
• MARBLE MOON (Egg sack). Sculpture; Stone, 28" x 38" x 18", 2019.
• GLITCH COINS . Sculpture; Coins, copper, 1" x 1" x 5", 2019.

EXHIBITION PRESS

• VLM Interview: Image Culture - Podcast, Interviewed by William Jess Laird, 2019.
• Virginia L. Montgomery | ARTSPACE | 7 Artists To Watch in 2019, Artspace, 2019.

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MIND STONE
Sculpture; stone, memory foam. 72" x 84" x 33", 2025.
MIND STONE is a stone-on-foam sculpture that offers any body — stone or human — a soft place to rest. While memory foam remembers nothing but itself, in contrast, a stone never forgets. MIND STONE is composed of two materials: a ~100lb stone and memory foam mattresses.




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THE PONY HOTEL
Solo show, Museum Folkwang, Germany.
May 9 - June 23, 2019. Curator Antonina Krezdorn.
PRESS RELEASE – Museum Folkwang presents the first institutional solo show by Virginia L. Montgomery to be held in Europe. Her video piece PONY HOTEL (2018) brings together symbolically charged elements in various combinations and interactions that open up a multitude of associations: a hand with manicured finger Danish pastry, white syrup drops onto a watch, braids in several variations – sometimes made of blond or coloured strands, other times suspended as if bodiless – develop a life of their own. The ponytail is the key protagonist in PONY HOTEL and simultaneously visualizes an actual aspect of VLM’s own work. Aside from her work as an artist VLM freelances as a graphic facilitator and travels throughout the United States to conferences where she provides the live visualization. She often uses the hotel room she stays in as the setting for her videos. Then in the studio in a fast edit she combines the sequences with an unusual soundtrack that consists of a mixture of background noises and sounds from nature. The resulting interplay of audio and visual elements produces an enigmatic, surreal atmosphere. In Museum Folkwang Virginia L. Montgomery combines her work with a sculpture from the collection: an interest in flowing liquids provides a link between George Minne’s 'L’homme à l’outr'e (Man with Wineskin, 1897) and PONY HOTEL, without detracting from the manifold levels of meaning in the dripping, flowing, spurting liquids. Notwithstanding the different epochs, styles and media involved in the dialogue between the two works an interplay is created that is characterized by our search for the hidden meaning of things.

EXHIBITION IMAGES



PONY HOTEL, FILM STILL IMAGES


PONY HOTEL, FILM

4k Digital video, 05:17, 2018.
PONY HOTEL braids together a tale of three ponytails: real, prop, and fantasy. The surreal short art-film is a blended montage of fantastical macro-scale studio footage and actual film footage VLM captured whilst traveling on business trips and documenting her 3ft ponytail prop inside various hotel rooms. In the culminating dream-inside-a-dream sequence, the film's physical picture plane is penetrated by a Dewalt drill that conjures the manifestation of a meta ponytail, The Rainbow Ponytail Supreme. All footage is original — produced, edited, and scored by VLM.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Thank you Curator Antonina Krezdorn, Museum Folkwang.
• The film, PONY HOTEL, first debuted at CRUSH Curatorial, NY, 2018.

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AN UNBOUND KNOT IN THE WIND
CSS Bard: The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard University
Artists: Anna Betbeze, Louise Bourgeois, Youmna Chlala, Virginia L. Montgomery, David Wojnarowicz
Curator Alison Karasyk
April 8 - May 27 2018
CATALOG TEXT – "Virginia L. Montgomery’s video and sculptural works interrelate concerns of climate, weather, gender, and destruction. The artist’s sculpture Split Sword (2017) takes its shape from a medieval divination tool known as the Y-rod that was traditionally employed as an alternative means for discovering natural resources such as water, gold or oil. Montgomery extends this inquiry to explore how agency may also be conjured as a resource amidst ideological adversity with her new video, Water Witching (2018). The video’s dream-like effect is achieved through interwoven archival footage, glitch frequencies, the artist’s performative gestures, and field recordings that give texture to the sounds of water, wind, machines, human protest, and animals. A third work, Headstone (2016), is made up of a spheroidal rock whose initial mass was carved by the melting of the North American glaciers, its surface physically marked by this passage and constituting what the artist calls a “laboring object” which has finally come to rest in the exhibition. Together, these works form a constellation of explorations into systems of human and non-human relation, impact and erasure, and communing and agency." – Curator Alison Karasyk

WORKS
WATER WITCHING, HD video, 07:06, 2018. Commissioned film.
HEAD STONE, Stone, memory foam. 72" x 84" x 33", 2016.
SPLIT SWORD, Black mirror, steel. 36” x 32” x 12", 2017.




PRESS RELEASE - An “unbound knot in the wind” was said to be the cause of storms that swept the Arctic throughout the 17th century, wrecking ships at sea off the barren coast of Finnmark, Norway’s far northeastern region. The storms were blamed on witches and sorcerers unleashing the demonic forces of this coastal terrain, and this accusation contributed to a wider panic about supposed deviant activity in the region. In all, ninety-one Norwegian and Sami women and men were tried and executed, constituting about one-third of all those killed in the country’s witchcraft trials. Four centuries after this atrocity, Peter Zumthor and Louise Bourgeois collaborated in 2011 to create the Steilneset Memorial to the Victims of the Finnmark Witchcraft Trials in Vardø, Norway. The memorial performs a unique labor of commemoration, resisting monumentality, warning against state violence, and engaging the climatological dynamic of the site. Today, we are continually confronted by the consequences of our relationship to the environment. Human beings have quite literally changed the weather, even if they are rarely accused of being witches for doing so. Social violence based on projections and misreadings of difference have not abated, but continue in new forms. Contending with these realities, An unbound knot in the wind takes the abovementioned history and memorial as a departure point. The exhibition brings together commissions by Youmna Chlala and Virginia L. Montgomery and works by Anna Betbeze, Louise Bourgeois, and David Wojnarowicz. In their respective practices, these artists respond to and challenge systems of order and linearity that span distinct temporal and environmental contexts. They interrogate gendered and ideological power structures, complicate interstices of memory and materiality, and explore designations of deviance that hinge on categories of belonging. Positioned in dialogue with both the memorial and this history, the artworks in An unbound knot in the wind suggest that the dynamics that culminated in these atrocious trials remain entirely operative today.



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PONY HOTEL
4k Digital video, 05:17, 2018.
PONY HOTEL braids together a tale of three ponytails: real, prop, and fantasy. The surreal short art-film is a blended montage of fantastical macro-scale studio footage and actual film footage VLM captured whilst traveling on business trips and documenting her 3ft ponytail prop inside various hotel rooms. In the culminating dream-inside-a-dream sequence, the film's physical picture plane is penetrated by a Dewalt drill that conjures the manifestation of a meta ponytail, The Rainbow Ponytail Supreme. All footage is original — produced, edited, and scored by VLM.


EXHIBITION HISTORY
• VLM: Screen Series, New Museum, NY, 2019.
• THE PONY HOTEL, Museum Folkwang, Germany, 2019.
• OPEN MIND, CRUSH Curatorial, NY, 2018.

CONFERENCE CREATURE
Performance, 2022. Created with support from Big Medium and the Line Hotel's Artist in Residency program.
CONFERENCE CREATURE documents a simple, witchy performance by VLM where she ritually rolls rocks at sunrise to prime an empty conference room with natural metaphysical energy, all while dressed as a Luna Moth in business attire. VLM's aesthetics and actions conjure associations of Psyche, the moth-winged Grecian goddess who symbolizes the resilience of the human spirit, and Sisyphus, the tragic Grecian antihero condemned to roll a rock uphill forever. Inspired by the 2022 labor crisis, panpsychic philosophy, academic ecofeminist Donna Haraway's writings, and existential philosopher Albert Camus texts on Sisyphus, Conference Creatures shows VLM laboring in secret, much like a nocturnal Luna Moth, to exercise her own agency before the sun rises. Conference Creature was created in a sliver of stolen time; the performance was filmed onsite at Austin, Texas' downtown Line Hotel on Tuesday, February 15, 2022 from 6:15 - 7:30am. It concluded exactly 15 minutes before 300 technologists populated the same workroom where VLM and the rock had been.

In her film, both artist and rock slip and slide across the same conference room floor to an ambivalent audience of oak trees, bird songs, and morning traffic. Materially, the uncanny choreography of the rock that rolls in Conference Creature results from the stone's unique material composition and formation. The rock is a rare North American geological anomaly called a "whirlpool grindstone" that is subsequently super smooth, but irregularly weighted, and thereby unpredictable in all movements. Visually, the camera's POV shifts freely between artist and rock, privileging neither, as both tumble awkwardly across the screen. Sonically, the soundscape for Conference Creature is unique; it features field recordings of overhead planes, underground caves, windchimes, leaky water faucets, and native Texas grackle birdsongs that each, in turn, punctuate VLM's dreamworld with playful whimsy.

Conceptually, Conference Creature operates in context to Camus' claim that when Sisyphus acknowledges the certainty of one's fate as an ever-laboring body, one is freed to realize the absurdity of the situation, and thus able to grasp a state of contented acceptance amidst life's inevitable chaos. Camus concludes that "all is well," indeed, that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy." VLM's Conference Creature posits that one may find happiness when working alongside, not against, the energies of nature. Conference Creature was visually produced, audio engineered, and physically performed by the artist VLM.

Conference Creature by VLM (Virginia L. Montgomery) was created with support from Big Medium and in collaboration with the Line Hotel's Artist in Residency program.



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DEEP SEE
HD video, 01:57, 2017.
DEEP SEE is a metaphysical short video. The work engages cognitive recursion as a poetic device via forms of blended perception with a disembodied 4ft blonde pony-tail prop boxed inside a complex, oceanic dream. The video merges internal and external reflections. DEEP SEE deploys simultaneous sensorial strategies of visual, auditory and linguistic looping to incite "double-meanings" and to build a dream inside a dream.



"Once I dreamt my mind was an ocean box and my ponytail was inside it. Even though my ponytail is mine, I can never fully see it as it grows from the back of my head. So, I built it real: I sea swam with a 4ft surrogate. I wanted to see my ponytail swim detached from me in the sea. And to see the sea as a box on a screen. And when I filmed it I was also inside the ocean and the box on the screen. I made a psychic echo by drilling into my dream; I can now deep see."



PREVIOUS EXHIBITION
CRASH TEST, La Panacée, Montpelier, France.
SOS ONSHORE OFFSHORE, MEYOHAS, New York City, USA.
Video and Poetry Film Festival, Los Angeles, USA
Screening, Harvard Film Archive, Boston, USA.
Twenty/20!, Edward Cella Gallery, Los Angeles, USA.
Catch 73, Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn, USA.




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