TRIAGE was a duo exhibition of cross disciplinary art at Throughline Collective Gallery (Houston, TX, US) that looked at our environment as a living entity, composed of interconnected organisms that thrive, evolve, and suffer trauma, as humans do. Through installation, video, drawing, embroidery, and interactive projects, artist Ellen H. Ray and I celebrated the resilience of non-human life, while reflecting on consequences of environmental damage and our urgent need for deeper connections to the nonhuman world. As both of us question dichotomies emerging from our reliance on climate-compromising technology, our goal was to amplify hope exhibited in the persistence and tenacity of nature.

Included in the exhibition was a second iteration of my ongoing Brio Memory Project that brings personal stories to light related to Houston’s industrial pollution issues. Initially inspired by the Brio Superfund site in Southeast Houston, this iteration launched an expansion of the project into Houston’s Fifth Ward and its creosote contamination, linked to Brio through cancer-causing agents found at both sites. TRIAGE’s programs included an offsite performance by the hardcore breakbeat punk band Briokids (whose members grew up across Clear Creek from the Brio site) and a community reading that brought residents from different areas of Houston together to share their experiences. Thanks in great part to a Support for Artists and Creative Individuals Grant provided by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance, the project has moved much closer toward its eventual goal of mapping, bridging and amplifying voices of individuals and communities affected by industrial pollution all across the Houston metropolitan region.

Three new installations - related either directly or tangentially to The Brio Memory Project - proposed a correlation between the earth’s surface and human skin, both being defined by regenerating cells that are vulnerable to trauma and that are part of larger ecosystems of networked, collaborative living entities.

Islands of Skin includes a threadbare and frayed used work shirt, machine and hand-embroidered with an Environmental Protection Agency-contracted topographical map of the Brio Superfund site, hanging amidst three large sheets of handmade paper embedded with native Gulf Coast Prairie seeds. The paper is made from a mixture of household waste and detritus collected from the perimeter of the Superfund site. Upon close inspection, the shirt reveals the locations of wells installed by the EPA to test for ground water contaminants. Stitched onto the back are cul-de-sacs referencing the Southbend subdivision built right on the Brio Refining property line - a community living in 677 houses that were torn down after large numbers of residents were sickened by toxic air and groundwater.

Chemical Embrace is an istallation made from used work clothing fragments - scrubs, butcher aprons, threadbare t-shirts, “business casual” kahki pants - embroidered with the names of oil and gas-derived chemicals and geological references. These are machine-embroidered or freehand machine quilt-stitched in in off-white or light colored polyester thread that name oil and gas-derived chemicals and heavily manipulated topography. The foregrounds feature diagrams of drill bits, monitor wells (used to detect contaminants in ground water), dental braces and corrective back brace implants, embroidered by hand in black cotton floss. The embroideries are draped among unembellished fabric scraps and threadbare, worn clothing pieces.

Rebirth is an assemblage made from a detached, damaged gas meter inside a round glass vessel filled with potting soil. Immersed in the soil are four 9” x 7” sheets of seed-embedded paper hand made from detritus picked up off the ground near the Brio Superfund site - the same paper used to make drawings for The Brio Memory Project, that are set loose in the damaged landscape in gestures of homage to those affected by Brio’s toxins. The gas meter was retrieved from the berm of one of the retention ponds now occupying the footprint of a subdivision once built on the Brio property line, that was demolished after residents in large numbers became ill. The seeds in the paper have sprouted and grown into native prairie grasses and flower stems, despite any toxins that may have been in the paper or left on the gas meter.

PROGRAMS

ARTIST TALK
Saturday, April 5, 2025

Dr. Laura Augusta, Jane Dale Owen Director & Chief Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum (University of Houston), moderated this wonderful discussion of Ellen and my work in TRIAGE. Her gracious and insightful questions prompted us each to think about our work in new ways as we described our ideas, processes and the motivations behind our art practices.

THE HAPPENING at The Orange Show, with BRIOKIDS
Friday, April 25, 2025

While conducting research on the Brio Superfund site, “Briokids” turned up on a Google search. It’s the name of a hardcore breakbeat punk band from Friendswood, TX, whose two members, Spencer Smith and Alan Hencey, grew up around the corner from each other in a neighborhood across Clear Creek from Brio. It took some time to track them down, but thankfully Spencer (aka Ickoo) answered when I emailed briokidsrecordings@gmail.com - and he was more than willing to talk about what it was like growing up so near Texas’ most notorious toxic waste dump. He and his friends swam in the creek regularly. They went hunting for mushrooms in the fields surrounding Brio and played in the nearby ball field that, like the Southbend subdivision, was abandoned after kids became sick from mud mixed with styrene tars that bubbled up through the ground’s surface. Too many of their friends have died from cancer. Luckily, Briokids are still around to express their truth.

I was grateful for Spencer’s contribution to the project, and we kept in touch. Before long I met Alan (aka Virus B-23), and eventually we made a plan for the band to perform in earnest, in a space where they could play hard and loud, expressing themselves to the fullest extent possible. Thanks to the Orange Show for Visionary Art’s Pete Gershon, Andrew Whit, and Caz Scott, Briokids performed together for the first time in nearly 13 years - scheduled to coincide with TRIAGE and be included in the show’s programming.

What an incredible honor it was to see them play, in all their glory, songs about toxic waste and dead end, “suburban planned community” life, made livable through a tribe of friends who all understood what they were making music about. They call themselves the 518 - after FM518 that slices through the middle of Friendswood. And they all turned up from many a distant corner to hear Briokids play.

In the true spirit of punk, they still give their music away. Download and listen to them here. Follow their YouTube here.

Photos by Sara Buchsbaum and Heather L Johnson

COMMUNITY READING
Sunday, April 27, 2025

In Progress! Description, images and video coming soon.