By Cerise Vallon, Columnist-at-Large for Underground Mirror 

“Bayou Reveries — An Audubon Redux at the Margot Fenley Gallery, Houston

It was the kind of evening that sweats polite tension: champagne flutes clinking, laughter ricocheting off concrete walls, and the high-end citrus of boutique diffusers battling the faint musk of perspiration and wealth. The well dressed attendees gathered like taxonomists at a wake for the debut of Nature in Concrete Limbo, the latest exhibition from Houston-based painter and conceptualist Wren Damaris Bly. Their name is still unfamiliar to many but already whispered reverently by Rice MFA grads and keen-eyed CAM docents.

The venue: The Margot Fenley Gallery, an aggressively minimalist space off Montrose that once sold artisanal lighting to oil execs and now hosts installations no one entirely understands but everyone Instagrams.

Bly’s large-format canvases are exacting reinterpretations of John James Audubon’s birds; egrets, herons, roseate spoonbills, rendered in archival ink and bleeding gouache. But each tableau is sabotaged: a soda can peeks from cattails, a Whataburger bag twists through marsh grass, a turtle’s stunned eye peers from a clear plastic clamshell. The juxtaposition isn’t subtle, nor is it meant to be. Bly, unlike the gallerists or many of their patrons, is refreshingly uninterested in subtlety.

As the crowd filtered in, philanthropic socialites, second-tier influencers, and trust fund nepo babies fresh from boardrooms, overpriced bedrooms or cocktails at Drake’s Hollywood, the commentary swirled like notes on an overpriced bottle of pinot:

“Oh, this one feels… dirty but intelligent.”
“I love the frame, it’s giving off sassy dystopia.”
“I think that’s a commentary on coastal erosion. Or late capitalism. Or maybe… drainage infrastructure?”

A woman in heels worth more than my Hyundai leaned toward a canvas and whispered, “I want this for my entryway, I just wish the bird wasn’t so sad.” The bird, a great blue heron gazing into an oil-slicked shimmer, offered no rebuttal.

Then, halfway through the evening, it happened.

The clink of a spoon on glass. Wren Bly, a willowy figure in a shirt the exact shade of pond scum, stepped forward. They looked, for a moment, like someone who had misunderstood the assignment at a destination wedding.

“When early French naturalists came to this region in 1837,” they began, voice calm and unadorned, “they wrote of impossible beauty. The abundance. The birds. The smell and sound of a world that seemed too alive to describe.”

A pause.

“Audubon’s journals and art allow us to see it as it was. My paintings allow you to see it as it is. I still see echoes of the past in our area waterways. I really do. But now, I have to filter it through concrete drainage pipes, overpasses, chain link fences, the blue of Kroger bags tangled in trees, the smell of runoff and gasoline. Nature isn’t pristine here. We’re severed from it. And still, it persists… adapts”

Scattered nods. Possibly reflexive.

“We have to stop editing the world to make it palatable,” Bly said. “We need to see it as it is. Not as it was. Not how we wish it were. But most of all, we must not ignore it.”

Then came the 5 gallon bucket.

It had been sitting in the corner all night, ignored, mistaken for a janitor’s prop. Bly walked over, lifted the lid, and revealed a viscous, roiling mess: frogs, trash, algae, snakes, and what may have been a baby turtle with a cigarette butt lodged in its shell.

Without flourish, they tipped it and a couple others.

Brown-green water sloshed and spread across the gallery’s polished concrete floor towards the patrons. Frogs leapt. The turtle made a pitiful scoot. A woman screamed. Another climbed onto a bench in her Louboutins. Champagne flutes shattered.

“I paid five thousand dollars for these loafers,” someone muttered, as a toad rebounded gleefully off his calf.

Pandemonium. Confused glances. Then: applause.

Reactions came fast, confused, and utterly on-brand:

CultureMaps called it “a necessary rupture of bourgeois complacency.”

A prominent MFAH donor denounced it as “juvenile performance art disguised as climate grief.”

The Bayou Preservation Alliance issued a cautious statement praising the “spirit of ecological engagement,” while gently reminding the public not to release wildlife indoors.

But perhaps the most honest review came from a barefoot child who wandered in from the sidewalk to collect critters from the frog water, and said:

“That was super gross. But so-o cool. Check out this snake I caught!”

The art was all purchased by the end of the night. Wren Bly has since declined all interviews. They’ve reportedly relocated to a secret cabin in Anahuac to “reconnect with silence” and work on their next project.

The gallery now bears a temporary sign: “Closed for Cleaning.”

Because art, like runoff, always finds its way in.

Cerise Vallon has been writing semi-reluctantly about contemporary art since 1997. Her columns appear in ART-NEWSIONIST, Blunt Object Quarterly, and the airport edition of Texas Monthly. She lives in a historic duplex in the Heights with peeling paint and three cats named after dead Spanish muralists.