Virginia Lee Montgomery SKY LOOP

Inspired by Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Houston and the artist’s childhood neighborhood, SKY LOOP is an ambitious, multi-disciplinary project by Virginia Lee Montgomery. SKY LOOP introduces a new direction for Montgomery in her art, both conceptually and materially, and presents a rigorous and metaphysical analysis of Hurricane Harvey as told through a formal yet subconscious language of Houston-specific symbols. To make the film, Montgomery utilizes a combination of archival footage, footage shot of Hurricane Harvey as she weathered the storm with her mother, and footage shot from her studio and alongside the Buffalo Bayou.

VLM (b. 1986; Houston, TX, USA) is a filmmaker, sculptor, and facilitator. 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 metaphysics. Its content is surreal, latently autobiographical, and often with a feminist impulse. The work is paradoxically cryptic and literal, conceptual and hand-built, digital and physical. While her artwork shifts in subject matter from syrups to storms to stones, VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures like drilling, dousing, or reaching and recursive symbols like circles, spirals, spheres, and holes. Her movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures—revealing matters of being, knowing, identity, action, space, and time. VLM also works as a professional mind-map scribe, a Graphic Facilitator.

Wendy Vogel is an art critic, writer, and independent curator based in New York. Her reviews and essays on contemporary art have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, art-agenda, Flash Art, frieze, The Guardian, and MOUSSE, among other publications. She currently teaches in the BFA photography department at Parsons School of Design, and has previously taught at the School of Visual Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, Rice University, and the University of Houston. She is a 2018 recipient of The Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing. Vogel holds a BA from New York University, an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and was a Critical Fellow in the CORE Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.