Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I’m Virginia L. Montgomery, a multimedia artist working across video, sound, and sculpture, and living between Austin and Houston, Texas. I hold an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from The University of Texas at Austin. My work explores surrealism, science, and mysticism, offering audiences moments of metamorphosis and cosmic wonder via my own neurodivergent lens. Growing up in Houston, I was immersed in both science and art. From my uncle’s work at NASA to my grandfather’s career as a scientist, I developed a deep fascination with the cosmos and biology. Early visits to Houston’s Menil Collection, particularly its surrealist holdings, shaped my most formative encounters with art. Surrealism became my foundational framework, revealing art as a hybrid space where inner and outer worlds converge. As a neurodivergent artist with autism and synesthesia, I create sensory-rich artworks that cultivate calm and spark unexpected thematic connections. My practice often includes partnerships with scientists and collaborations with nature herself, such as hand-raising and documenting native North American butterflies and moths as living symbols of transformation. Through delicate soundscapes, tactile sculptures, and dreamlike videos, I invite audiences into immersive, synesthetic worlds that center transformation and care. I aim to reframe the autistic experience as a distinct and valuable way of perceiving the world—one attuned to subtle, often unseen details—while revealing the profound and uncanny connections that unite us all.

While At Headlands

During my time at Headlands, I plan to create a new body of site-specific multimedia work exploring the theme of cosmic awe. Continuing my astrophotography practice, I will capture circular, time-lapse star trail images of the rotating night sky over nearby Rodeo Beach. Through long exposures, I will trace the earth’s slow rotation, revealing luminous arcs of starlight as they move across the park’s horizon. In contrast, my daytime video practice will turn toward the intimate and terrestrial: macro studies of native insect species (like the Marin Headlands’ endangered Mission Blue Butterfly) and other parkland ecological entities. By pairing (and contrasting) immense celestial expanses with delicate, close-range encounters from the natural world, I seek to explore the mystical idea of “as above, so below.” As a research-driven multimedia artist, maintaining a studio at Headlands affords me the agency to move fluidly between fieldwork and reflection, as I capture images, layer sound, and mystically translate the profound interconnectedness of the macro and the micro.