HOUSTON, TX – March 11, 2024

Buffalo Bayou Partnership (BBP) and Aurora Picture Show are pleased to present the third annual NIGHT LIGHT: a free evening of video art on the Buffalo Bayou East trails. Launched in 2022 and continued in 2023, the wildly popular NIGHT LIGHT will return on Saturday, April 6, 2024, from 8 – 10pm with four new, site-specific art installations. The event will once again be located throughout Tony Marron Park with video works projected on surfaces along a half-mile stretch of waterfront trails. After experiencing this year’s unique art installations, attendees will also be able to enjoy a vibrant market with music, food trucks, refreshments, and neighborhood vendors and artisans.

Houston artists Ronald Llewellyn Jones, Violette Bule, and Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin have each created abstract and experimental, site-specific works for the evening. Artworks will engage with and animate infrastructure and site features, including the water itself. Additionally, the evening will feature the premiere of HomeBayou, a stop-motion short film about the Buffalo Bayou East area created by artist Ezra Wube in collaboration with East End and Fifth Ward residents.

This year’s NIGHT LIGHT will take place at Tony Marron Park, the green space hub of BBP’s master plan for the Buffalo Bayou East area. In addition to expansive and welcoming open spaces, Buffalo Bayou East will include neighborhood trail connections, reimagined industrial sites, and other unique gathering spaces that connect Houstonians with their historic waterway.

“In addition to showcasing these engaging works, NIGHT LIGHT also serves to connect visitors with the waterfront trails east of downtown,” says Karen Farber, BBP’s Vice President of External Affairs. “By activating these spaces, we are welcoming community members to experience locations they may not have seen or noticed before. We are grateful to Aurora Picture Show for partnering with us once again on this adventurous program.”

“NIGHT LIGHT offers the Houston community a truly unique experience and provides a platform for local artists who have an intimate relationship with the city’s natural, urban, and cultural landscapes,” says Salome Kokoladze, Aurora Picture Show Curator. “These commissioned video works represent diverse voices, connecting history and tradition to the future and engaging the power of playfulness in community building.”

Works

Ronald Llewellyn Jones
Cross No Horizon is an original audio/visual installation shedding light on the arduous journeys undertaken by immigrants, migrants, and asylum seekers in their quest to reach the United States. Projecting archival and documentary footage and text on a dock across the bayou, this installation delves into the desires and challenges that fuel an unwavering determination to seek a brighter future just beyond the horizon. Ronald Llewellyn Jones is a Houston-based visual artist and filmmaker whose work is influenced by oral histories and marginalized communities’ narratives. https://ronaldljones.com

Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin
Punks, Jockers, and Rails is a multi-channel video installation exploring queer subcultures among early 20th Century hobos. Projected on the underside of a bridge through cut physical screens, the work incorporates text from sociologist Nels Anderson’s 1920s research, which the artists have stenciled in vibrant dry pigment powder and then blow away in a rumination on the beauty and ephemerality of queer histories. This piece is part of the artists’ ongoing “50 States” series of interdisciplinary installations celebrating little-known queer histories around the country. Vaughan & Margolin are Houston-based interdisciplinary artists. Their life’s work is an ongoing series of interdisciplinary installations inspired by little-known LGBTQI2 histories from each state in the country. http://www.nickandjakestudio.com

Violette Bule
Grounded in intimate personal contexts, Being for others proposes a reflection on identity and navigating bureaucratic space. The project invites spectators to reconsider the value of empathy in our times of immigration crisis and multiracial acculturation in societal discussions and political campaigns. This installation presents hundreds of personal portraits accompanied by a poem recited by 67 collaborators of different nationalities and translated into 21 different languages. Violette Bule is a Venezuelan-Lebanese conceptual artist and photographer based in Houston whose work examines power dynamics that shape everyday life, underscoring the entanglement of capitalism and structural racism in interrelated migration patterns, nationalism, populism, and social justice. https://www.violettebule.com

Ezra Wube
HomeBayou is a new stop-motion animation film created through Wube’s residency with the High Line Network, of which Buffalo Bayou Partnership is a member. Wube is traveling to five cities to co-create short segments that portray communities through the eyes of their members. In Houston, Wube worked together with participants from the Greater East End and Fifth Ward neighborhoods to make visual and auditory maps of Buffalo Bayou East using media, materials, personal objects, and words. Originally from Addis Adaba, Ethiopia, and now residing in New York, Ezra Wube uses painting, collage, small sculptures, and paper cutouts to narrate scenes of daily life from around the world, exploring our relationships to bustling metropolises and natural spaces.

About Buffalo Bayou Partnership
Established in 1986, Buffalo Bayou Partnership (BBP) is the non-profit organization creating and stewarding welcoming parks, trails, and unique spaces, connecting Houstonians with the city’s most significant natural waterway. The organization’s geographic focus is the 10-square mile stretch of the bayou that flows from Shepherd Drive, through the heart of downtown into the East End, and on to the Port of Houston Turning Basin. In addition to constructing award-winning green spaces such as Buffalo Bayou Park, BBP also removes trash from the waterway and activates the bayou through unique programs, public art, volunteer events, and recreational opportunities that enrich the quality of life in Houston.

About Aurora Picture Show
Founded in 1998, Aurora Picture Show is a Houston-based non-profit media arts organization dedicated to expanding the cinematic experience and promoting the understanding and appreciation of moving image art. Throughout the year, Aurora presents innovative non-traditional, artist-made film, video, and multidisciplinary works. We support artists, engage audiences, foster community collaboration, and seed the future of creative media-making in Houston through unique artistic and educational experiences.