STATEMENT OF WORK

I'm Virginia Luna Montgomery, a multidisciplinary metaphysical artist who moves freely between video, performance, sound, and sculpture. My diverse artistic movements interrogate the relationship between physical and psychic structures, as I seek to reveal elements of atomic consciousness operating across non-hierarchical and non-linear time-lines. In the studio, I imbue my art-making with diverse realms of knowledge, like ancient mysticism, moth ecology, and feminist psychoanalysis. My artworks are influenced by the panpsychic belief that all matter emerges in tandem with consciousness. As such, I like imagining that as a viewer you are never truly alone when looking at an artwork, because maybe my artwork—which is also matter—is looking back at you!

In my practice, imagery of eyes, circles, spheres, and holes regularly repeat. This is intentional! My artwork also deploys subconscious languages of sensorial gestures, textures, and sounds. I psychically sculpt with symbols. Yet, all of my artwork is by my own hands. I make my own work from conception to production. I handle my own video production, editing, and direction. I score my own soundscapes with my own sonic field-recordings. I sculpt my own sculptures with stones that I carve by hand. I also raise the Luna Moths seen in my videos. Moth care-taking is a time-intense act of love that spans from they are tiny eggs until they emerge from their cocoons to fly away into the sky. Through my own artistic labors, I seek to assist the psychic presence that flows between all physical and non-physical things. Because as an artist, I wish to contribute to a world that is more ethical, agential, and psychically inter-connected.

The philosophical thematics of my videos, soundscapes, sculpture and installations, explore ideas from psychology, biology, and the mythology of new awakenings. For example, from reading Donna Haraway’s ‘When Species Meet,’ I’ve learned there is considerable overlap between posthumanism, ecofeminism, and feminist metaphysics. Haraway reflects upon the ways that our relationships with non-humans can entrench oppression of all kinds. How do we stop oppression? As an artist, I believe that contemporary art must be grounded in a panpsychic metaphysics that attributes consciousness all the way down to luna moths, rocks, plants, machines, and so on in order to neutralize hierarchies that justify oppression. This is why my artwork’s collaborators include ecological entities like stones, honey, and luna moths, alongside technological entities like lens-based cameras, power-drills, and machines. My art asks you to consider that there is a subconscious, surreal, and resilient force that inclusively collaborates with us. Together, the subjects, symbols, sounds, textures, and gestures that populate my artworks rupture material surfaces, opening new portals into conscious connection, tangible hope, and psychic healing.