Director: Virginia Lee Montgomery

Synopsis: BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED is a metaphysical art film about regeneration, hope, and recovery. Inspired by ‘The Butterfly Effect’—the philosophical theorem that any small change in our environment, even the gentle flapping of a butterfly’s wings may manifest big climatic change—the film documents the ethereal emergence of live butterflies over storm imagery. Collectively, BUTTERFLY BIRTH BED’s symbolism and elemental soundscape facilitate a surreal incantation of hope, healing, regeneration. The film is directed, edited, and scored by VLM.

Bio: VLM (Virginia Lee Montgomery) (b. 1986, Houston, Texas, USA) is a polymath and multi-media artist. She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2016. Working across video, performance, sound, and sculpture, her artwork is a research practice of feminist metaphysics. It is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. While her artwork shifts in subject matter from ponytails to particle accelerators, to syrups, stones, moths and machines—VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures like drilling, dousing, or reaching and recursive symbols like circles, holes and spheres. Her diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures, the poetics of physics, and the metaphysical connection between life’s material and mental realms. VLM also works outside the “art world” as a visual scribe, a Graphic Facilitator, a career for which she travels the country to diagram the development of ideas at group meetings, innovation events, and conferences for corporate clients. 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 logic of her own dreams and memories. Her output is her artwork. Collectively, VLM’s symbols, forms, and gestures rupture material surfaces, opening up portals to unknown psychic ends…

Program: Color, Movement & Space – VAEFF 2021