Neon Railroad

Neon Railroad, created with Kevin Chong, grew out of research conducted during a six-month residency with the City of Navasota, Texas. Navasota identifies itself as a railroad town, and the railroad remains central to the city’s history and identity. The railroad formed a visible boundary within the city. Crossing the tracks meant moving between parts of town shaped by very different histories of segregation, public investment, and economic opportunity. That history became the context for the installation, which occupied the abandoned P.A. Smith Hotel beside the railroad and filled its 4,500-square-foot ground floor with neon and argon light.

The work celebrates the romance and promise of the railroad as a technology built to connect people and places while recognizing how that same infrastructure came to reinforce existing divisions within a capitalist system. Installed in a vacant building beside the tracks, the light holds nostalgia for an older American dream alongside the reality of what that dream produced. Neon Railroad remains hopeful about the beauty of trains, movement, and connection while asking what becomes of a shared dream when its benefits are distributed so unevenly. 2016

Commissioned by the City of Navasota for the Texas Birthday Bash Festival.