Port & Starboard

Site-specific video installation with sound
Port and Starboard is a site-specific video projection project presented at Allen’s Landing along Buffalo Bayou, a historic point of arrival and navigation in Houston. Borrowing nautical terms that distinguish the two sides of a vessel, the work treats the bridge as both instrument and threshold—an architectural device that orients movement while holding two distinct surfaces in tension.
Projected onto the bridge’s angular and curved faces, origami boats, everyday objects, and shifting fields of light unfold in parallel sequences. On one side, materials align into provisional systems that echo the human impulse to chart direction. On the other, boats drift and illumination gathers and dissolves, suggesting buoyancy, reflection, and release.
Light functions as both guide and atmosphere—marking edges, tracing surfaces, and softening fixed form like a lighthouse. As viewers move around the bridge, the work activates the site as a navigational field shaped not by certainty, but by attention, balance, and improvisation. Situated at a crossing shaped by commerce, migration, and flow, Port and Starboard proposes navigation, like life, as an ongoing act grounded in everyday materials and gestures of play, where structure and drift remain in dynamic relation.
Commissioned by Aurora Picture Show and Buffalo Bayou Partnership for the Night Light 2026 Festival.
Curated by Sarah Stauder, Aurora Picture Show.