Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM)
Eye Moon Cocoon
Sat Oct 7, 2023 - Thu Nov 30, 2023
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 hatching 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.
About the Artist
Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) is a metaphysical, multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. Her synthesia-esque, surrealist artworks unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own lived experience as a neurodivergent individual. Her artwork explores the philosophical praxis of atomic consciousness via recursive symbols like circles, holes, spheres, and the faux eye-spots seen on moth wings. Her artistic efforts are characterized by material experimentation, somatic sensitivity, and her unusual studio practice of hand-raising the moths and butterflies seen in her videos. VLM’s diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures via uncanny gestures of agency, intimacy, empathy, and healing. VLM also holds a parallel career as a visual ideation scribe, a Graphic Facilitator, a unique profession for which she travels the world to diagram the development of ideas at generative group meetings like TED talks, DEI events, and innovation conferences. In her work as a fine artist, VLM turns this professional skill-set, which she describes as “mind map scribing,” inwards, to render the contours of her own subconscious and reveal insights from her healing world of dreams. Collectively, VLM’s symbols, forms, subjects, and gestures rupture material surfaces, opening up portals into the hope of atomic healing. VLM has had solo presentations with The Tate Modern (United Kingdom), New Museum (NY), Times Square Arts (NY), Museum Folkwang (Germany), Wright Lab at Yale University (CT), The Lawndale Art Center (TX), False Flag (NY), and Hesse Flatow (NY). She has also exhibited in group exhibitions at institutions including SculptureCenter (NY), La Panacée-MoCo (France), The Hessel Museum at Bard College (NY), The Banff Centre (Canada), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), The Blanton Museum (TX), The Contemporary Austin (TX), CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo, Tel Aviv, Israel, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), among others.
Moon Moth Bed from Virginia L. Montgomery on Vimeo.
LUNA BELLE from Virginia L. Montgomery on Vimeo.
