AEIVA Presents Virginia Lee Montgomery Visiting Artist Lecture

Virginia Lee Montgomery will be the juror of UAB’s 50th Annual Juried Student Exhibition that takes place every January at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts (AEIVA). VLM will present an artist lecture outling her artistic practice and career as a professional artist.

Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) is an award-winning experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She received her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin. VLM is known for her surreal, synthesia-esque artworks which unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own neurodivergent world. Her artworks are sensorial and symbolic. They shift 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 narratives of destruction, rebirth, and metamorphosis. 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 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 its symbology.

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), Ballroom Marfa (TX), Blanton Museum (TX), Contemporary Austin (TX), La Panacée-MoCo (France), The Hessel Museum at Bard College (NY), Banff Centre (Canada), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), Tate Film at Tate Modern (UK), among others…

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