Virginia L. Montgomery

Her artwork is known for its surrealist qualities, material experimentation, and thematic blending of science, mysticism, metaphysics, and 21st century feminist autobiography.

Montgomery is a neurodivergent individual who was raised in Houston, Texas.

Virginia L. Montgomery, also known as VLM, (born 1986) is an American multimedia artist working in video art, sound art, sculpture, performance, and illustration.

She has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe at museums, galleries, and film festivals.

She attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving her undergraduate BFA degree in 2008.

She studied sculpture at Yale University and received her graduate MFA degree from Yale in 2016.

Montgomery is an ecofeminist artist whose work utilizes symbolic imagery like circles, holes, and spheres to facilitate unexpected and multi-layered insights about the natural world, gender, technology, the human subconscious, and visual language.

Montgomery describes herself as an artist who “thinks in symbols.” Her artwork is impacted by her parallel creative career of graphic facilitation.

For over a decade, Virginia L. Montgomery has worked as a graphic facilitator, mapping concepts in diverse settings ranging from health care conferences to the launch of an app at South by Southwest in Austin.

In her art practice, VLM similarly choreographs symbols and sounds.

Recurrent motifs in her short, dreamlike videos include visual images such as dripping honey, butterflies, moths, ponytails, and ASMR-like soundtracks of her recordings of Texas thunderstorms, wind chimes, and dripping water.

In contrast to the shorthand legibility of the illustrations VLM creates as a graphic facilitator, her videos invoke multifaceted associations.

She describes being drawn to butterflies, for example, because of their historical association with rebirth, but also because of their connection to the “butterfly effect”—the theory that small gestures in the natural world can generate big changes.

Whether magnifying the eyespots of a butterfly, the eye of a storm, or the eye of the camera lens, her lexicon of circles, holes, and spheres offer portals into other ways of being and seeing, potential sites of transformation and healing.

Montgomery states in an interview with She/Folk magazine, "[Through my art] I can survey relationships between bodies, hierarchies between objects, genders, sound or forms, and thus allow forth a message to emerge from these intersecting realms of cognitive awareness and sensorial participation. In the exhibition catalog for Crash Test, Curator Nicolas Bourriaud writes, "...Montgomery's works display images atomized by technology: their aim is no longer to represent the world, but to find the points through which it manifests itself and operates, the source from which it draws its morphological power, in other words its capacity to generate forms and to produce effects." She has exhibited at art institutions including the Tate Modern New Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Times Square Arts, SculptureCenter, Museum Folkwang, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, La Panacée art centre (a.k.a. MO.CO.

PANACÉE), Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, Blanton Museum of Art, Houston Botanic Garden, and Lawndale Art Center. Montgomery has exhibited at galleries including Hesse Flatow Gallery, False Flag Gallery, Meyohas Gallery, and Kling & Bang. In 2017, Montgomery was commissioned by Yale University's Wright Lab to create Portal – a public sculpture memorializing Yale's decommissioned particle accelerator. Portal is on permanent display at Wright Lab Arts in New Haven, Connecticut.

Bella Luna is an experimental art-film depicting a luna moth as it flies between sticks and bells to create a soundscape.

In the film repeating circle-themed imagery appears like holes, spheres, eyes and the eye-spots on moth wings.

Bella Luna was exhibited at Kling & Bang in Reykjavik, Iceland.

O, Luna is a live-action video and sound artwork depicting the relationship between a luna moth and the artist, Virginia L. Montgomery.

The film investigates ecofeminist themes of materiality, metamorphosis, and "atomic consciousness."

O Luna references themes from mythology, feminist psychoanalysis, and material physics, such as the "Cosmic Egg" myth, the Grecian "Myth of Psyche," "the Gaze," and the "Coriolis Effect."

O Luna features luna moths raised by the artist.

The video was created, filmed, edited, and scored by Virginia L. Montgomery.

O Luna was exhibited at the Tate Modern, The Contemporary Austin, and Aurora Picture Show.

Butterfly Birth Bed is an experimental video artwork inspired by 'The Butterfly Effect'—the philosophical theorem that any small change in our environment, even the gentle flapping of a butterfly's wings may manifest change.

The film documents the emergence of live butterflies over miniature bed containing an image of a hurricane.

The video was self-produced and sound-scored by Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) after her experience enduring Hurricane Harvey.

Butterfly Birth Bed was featured inside the Film and Video Gallery of the Blanton Museum, Austin, Texas for the exhibition Day Jobs curated by Veronica Roberts.

The Sky Loop exhibition is a video art installation using a psychoanalytic perspective to explore the artist's firsthand experience of Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

The installation interweaves video imagery of hurricanes and butterflies as inspired by the Butterfly Effect theory.

The exhibition was commissioned by the Lawndale Art Center of Houston, Texas.

Montgomery was interviewed by NPR correspondent Catherine Lu about the Sky Loop video exhibition on KUHT Houston Public Media, 88.7FM radio.

Pony Cocoon is a video artwork depicting a luna moth hatching from a blonde ponytail hair prop.

The film conceptually interweaves themes of psychology and entomology.

The Pony Cocoon video is recorded in high definition macro camera footage.

The film's soundscape is original and constructed from field recordings by the artist.

Pony Cocoon was exhibited at False Flag Gallery in 2019.

Honey Moon is a public video artwork that was created for Times Square Arts in New York City.

The video depicts the artist's hand holding a small model moon as honey streams over it.