Image: still from Watersheds, 2024, 6K video with stereo sound, runtime: 60 minutes.
Watersheds is an experimental, research-based film that focuses on lesser-known landscapes of human habitation and extraction from prehistory to today, and was shot from kayak and car in the Trinity and San Jacinto rivers just east of Houston in June 2024. Most sites are places that I have visited regularly since 2013. All sound is authentic to each place, field-recorded by myself at time of filming.
All sites are strongly connected to water. The film starts with an early site of early human habitation, now-offshore due to sea level rise after the last ice age, and ends with the tangled lands and waters where the 1994 San Jacinto fire started, near the Rio Villa subdivision. Oil and and gas is also significant, from the permanently flooded Goose Creek oilfield, to orphaned wells behind a breached dike in Lost Lake, and murals celebrating the violence of the Battle of San Jacinto painted on the sides of petrochemical storage tanks adjacent to the subsided battlefield site itself.
Throughout, the presence of plants, birds, and insects are important markers. The cedar trees in Cedar Hill Park in Chambers County may be old enough to have been planted by the enslaved people at Labadie’s plantation, established there in 1833. Tallowtrees, an invasive species, now forest estuarine ecosystems in Mac Bayou and in the Trinity River estuary. A population explosion of Fall webworm moths, likely due to warming climate, leads to an asylum of cuckoos overheard in the swamps of Lake Charlotte in the weeks leading to summer solstice.
The intent of this film is to allow viewers to discover historical traces embedded in each site, and absorb interconnected meanings of each place, through watching and listening to primary source material collected by the artist – the visuals and sounds recorded at each place. The film’s title, Watersheds, refers to the watersheds themselves, but also important turning points in history.
This film will be accompanied by a supplementary timeline.
Watersheds is included in the DiverseWorks exhibition River On Fire, curated by Ashley DeHoyos.
This project was made possible by the support of DiverseWorks and the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.