Description: Moon Moth Bed is a surreal, symbolic, and eco-feminist art-film about destruction, rebirth, and collaborative consciousness. Inspired by Dr. Donna Haraway’s ecofeminist writings and panpsychic philosophy, this live-action, lens-based film investigates the idea that all matter is conscious and interconnected. Moon Moth Bed depicts real luna moths hatching from their cocoons amidst an ethereal video dreamworld set with bells, a miniature moon, and a small moth-scale bed. The film is cocooned in 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 hand-raised luna moth collaborators.
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).
