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. Her artwork is known for its surrealist qualities, material experimentation, and thematic blending of science, mysticism, and 21st-century neurodivergent, feminist autobiography. Montgomery is based between Houston and Austin, Texas.
Early life and education
Montgomery is a neurodivergent individual raised in Houston, Texas. She attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving her undergraduate BFA degree in 2008. She studied sculpture at Yale University, earning a MFA degree in 2016 and earning the Susan H. Whedon Award.
Work Montgomery is a multimedia artist whose work utilizes symbolic imagery like circles, holes, and spheres to facilitate unexpected and multi-layered insights about the natural world, philosophical metaphysics, and her own neurodivergent experience.
Montgomery describes herself as an artist who “thinks in symbols.” Recurrent motifs in her short, dreamlike videos include visual images such as dripping honey, emerging butterflies, and whirling drills, as set against her ASMR-like soundtracks of her recordings of Texas thunderstorms, wind chimes, and twinkling bells. In her art practice, Montgomery choreographs symbols and sounds in response to her hearing-motion condition of synesthesia. Her artworks invoke multifaceted associations. She describes being drawn to butterflies, for example, because of their historical association with rebirth, and because of their connection to the “butterfly effect," a mathematical theory that explores how small gestures in the natural world can unexpectedly 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 offers 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 in 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, Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, Blanton Museum of Art, Houston Botanic Garden, Lawndale Art Center., Ballroom Marfa, George Eastman Museum, Blaffer Art Museum, Aurora Picture Show., Cantor Arts Center, and Asia Society Museum.
Montgomery's permanent public art works on view include Portal – an outdoor steel sculpture memorializing Yale's decommissioned particle accelerator. Montgomery was commissioned by Yale University's Wright Lab to create Portal for permanent display at Wright Lab Arts in New Haven, Connecticut.
Video
Moon Moth Transcends Black Hole (2025)
Moon Moth Transcends Black Hole is a commissioned public video artwork on view from September 2025 - July 2026 at the Moody Arts Center in Houston, TX. 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 aspects of these different fields in whimsical and introspective projects that encompass video installations, photography, sculpture, and performance. Through an eerie layering of close-up shots of the moths and mathematical black hole 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.
''Stargazer Luna Moth Seeks the Moon (2025)Stargazer Luna Moth Seeks the Moon is a surreal, synesthesia-esque, short film about a Luna moth on her quest to meet the moon. Shot in high-definition macro footage by the artist Virginia L. Montgomery alongside her Luna moth collaborators, the film explores themes of metamorphosis and cosmic awe. The film collages together imagery of live Luna moths hatching from their cocoons amidst an ethereal video dreamworld of twinkling temple bells and punctuating mechanical drills. Collectively, these elements facilitate for audiences a moment of cosmic awe, where-in the film's sensorial qualities (color, sound, movement) all appear consciousness, interconnected, and alive.Honey Moon in Blue (2025)Honey Moon in Blue is a serene and sensorial short art-film about the uncanny flow of time. Coyly literal, the film depicts the artist's hand cradling a small model 3-D printed moon as real liquid honey sensually streams into a dark void beyond. Honey Moon in Blue was performed, produced, and edited by the artist. It was filmed by the artist in a single take within a miniature film-set. The work itself is surreal yet straightforward, documenting a real-time, solo performance with simple materials that encourage contemplation. Honey Moon in Blue, filmed in 2025 in 4k, was inspired by the artist's original film, Honey Moon, filmed in 2019 in HD, that was commissioned in 2019 by Midnight Moment | Times Square Arts for public display across 30+ digital billboards in New York City's Times Square.Astrophotography Timelapses over the McDonald Observatory with Cosmic Honey Flows (2025)"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 art residency at the Astronomer's Lodge. The film collages large-scale imagery of the cosmos together with macro-scale imagery of honey flowing across the screen to facilitate a moment of spacial awe. Astrophotography Timelapses" was created with support from Ballroom Marfa and the McDonald Observatory.Vestal Virgin Vengeance (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 that 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.Moon Moth Bed'' (2023)
Moon Moth Bed is a surreal and symbolic experimental short film about destruction, rebirth, and metamorphosis. Inspired by Dr. Donna Haraway's ecofeminist writings, this live-action film collages together imagery of real Luna moths amidst an ethereal 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 Virginia L. Montgomery alongside her Luna moth collaborators. Moon Moth Bed was commissioned by Women & Their Work Gallery (2024) for the artist's solo exhibition "Eye Moon Cocoon." Moon Moth Bed screened at The New Orleans Film Festival (2024) and The Front Fest (2024.)
Bella Luna (2023)
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 (2021)
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 (2020)
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.
Sky Loop (2020) 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 (2019)