Reception with the artists 17:00-20:00, Saturday, 19 April, 2025.

Opening This two person exhibition, Compact, Relaxed & Intact with sculptures by Millicent Young and video works by Virginia L. Montgomery, hopes to a bring stillness amongst the outside forces attempting to penetrate our psychical well-being. A place where we address looking within ourselves to reflect such natural inward beauty, opposed to outside ourselves to react to such distracting stimuli. We bring love, transformation and rest from any chaos on our outside, effecting us inside. We ask visitors to reflect on both macro and micro scale changes while resting with the present.

More curatorial information forthcoming.

The exhibition will be open weekends 12.00-18.00 hr (& by appt), and continue through Sunday, 22 June, 2025.

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, DEI events, 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), La Panacée-MoCo (France), The Hessel Museum at Bard College (NY), The Banff Centre (Canada), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), The Menil Collection (TX), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), among others...

Millicent Young is a studio artist focusing on sculpture, installation, and projects merging sound, poetry, and movement. Young (b.1958, NYC) attended the Dalton School on scholarship (1962-1976). Her study of visual art, craft, music, and poetry at Dalton and in the museums and streets of the city formed the foundation of her broad art education. Cross cultural childhood experiences, witnessing the impacts of poverty, the diversity of her family background, and her immersion in rural lifeways and wilderness were formative influences on Young's social ecological conscience and citizenship. Young went on to study at Wesleyan University, University of Virginia (BA 1984), University of Denver, and James Madison University (MFA 1997). 

As a young adult, Young worked as a laborer and later with underserved youth and women survivors of violence. From 1986-2003, Young was an art educator teaching studio art and art appreciation at the secondary and college levels and hybrid forms of movement practices in a community dance studio. Since 1993 she has worked as a freelance master gardener and landscape designer focusing on permaculture and healing.

Young has received two Professional Artist Fellowships from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; four grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (NYC); a NYSCA Artist Support Grant, a New York State/Arts Mid Hudson Arts and Culture Project Grant, and two Individual Artist Grants from the New York State Council on the Arts/Arts Mid Hudson. Since 1995, her work has received numerous awards from curators affiliated with the National Gallery/Smithsonian, Hirshhorn, Dia, New, Guggenheim, and Whitney Museums in juried exhibitions. It received a top award at the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Florence Italy (2005). Her work is included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts collection and was featured on the cover of Sculpture Magazine (March/April 2020). In 2022 she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Art, Design, and Art History at James Madison University. Since 2018, Young has had ten solo exhibitions in New York and Virginia. Locations for exhibitions and installations in 2024 include Castello 925 in Venice Italy (solo), Endicott College in Massachusetts (two person), and St. Michael’s College in Vermont (solo). Young's work will be featured at The Hyde Museum, NY in 2025.

Young currently resides in the Hudson Valley, NY having relocated from rural piedmont Virginia in 2017. She designed and built her current live/work space in the foothills of the Shawangunks. Her intimacy with place and all who inhabit it shape Young's practices daily.