Artist
VLM (Virginia L. Montgomery) (b. 1986, Houston, TX) is a multimedia artist whose projects reveal everyday magic in the world around us. She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2016. Working across video, performance, sound, and sculpture, her artwork explores atomic consciousness from a metaphysical feminist POV. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It blends together mysticism, science, and autobiography. It also shifts in subject matter from ponytails to particle accelerators, to syrups, stones, moths and machines as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures like drilling, dousing, or reaching and recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres. VLM’s diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures via gestures of agency and empathy. VLM also works outside the "art world" as a visual ideation scribe, a Graphic Facilitator, a unique career for which she travels the country to diagram the development of ideas at group meetings like DEI summits, TED talks, innovation events, and corporate 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 the logic of her own dreams. Collectively, VLM's symbols, forms, and gestures rupture material surfaces, opening up portals to unknown psychic ends and generate connections for consciousness. Throughout her 10 year+ career working a “double life” as both an artist and scribe, VLM often shares her own personal and professional struggles and successes as a single, self-supporting, working woman artist and small business owner. VLM believes in an intersectional culture of labor transparency to support and uplift working women creatives. As such, a significant fact about VLM’s art practice is that her art is authored her own by-hand and rendered via her own meticulous labor, digital skills, material knowledge, and personal history. In total, the objective of VLM’s studio art practice is to conjure a more magical and equitable world full of hope, healing, and conscious connection. VLM has had solo shows with New Museum (NY), Times Square Arts (NY), Museum Folkwang (Germany), Wright Lab at Yale University (CT), The Lawndale Art Center (TX), The Aurora Picture Show (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), The Contemporary Austin (TX), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), among others. VLM is the recipient of the following awards: Foundation for Contemporary Arts' Relief Grant, Big Medium's Artist Relief Fund, Socrates' Artist Fellowship, Yale University’s Susan H. Wedon Award, and Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Nominee in Sculpture. Residencies include the Line Hotel Residency (TX), Material Research Residency at the University of Texas at Austin Department of Engineering (TX), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), The Carving Studio and Sculpture Center (VT), Wright Lab at Yale Department of Physics (CT), Coast Time (OR), The Vermont Studio Center (VT), and The Shandaken Project at Storm King (NY).
