Description: HD Digital Video
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,” VLM, 2019.
Virginia L. Montgomery Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) is a multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She is known for her unique, synthesia-esque, surrealist works that unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own lived experience as a neurodivergent individual. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It shifts in subject matter from stones to moths and machines, as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures and recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres. Her artistic efforts are characterized by material experimentation, somatic sensitivity, and her unusual studio practice of hand-raising the moths and butterflies appearing in her videos. VLM’s diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures via gestures of agency, intimacy, and empathy. VLM also holds a parallel career; she works as a visual ideation scribe, a Graphic Facilitator, a unique profession for which she travels the world to diagram the development of ideas at 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 the symbolics of storytelling. Collectively, VLM's symbols, forms, subjects, and gestures rupture material surfaces, opening up portals into the hope of atomic consciousness.
VLM has had solo presentations with 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 Menil Collection (TX), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), among others...
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
• EYE MOON COCOON, Women & Their Work (2023).
• DREAM COCOON, Hesse Flatow NY (2020).
• SKY LOOP, Lawndale Art Center, TX (2020).
• SCREENS SERIES: VLM, New Museum, NY (2019).
• HONEY MOON, Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts, NY (2019).
• PONY COCOON, False Flag, NY (2019).
• THE PONY HOTEL, Museum Folkwang, Germany (2019).
• PARTICLE ACCELERATOR PROJECT, Yale Physics, CT (2018).
