testtubebaby

Vancouver, BC, Canada

TestTubeBaby’s art making started in the day-glow 80s AIDS crisis in a Los Angeles beach city where, before being expelled, Brian Gross was likely North America’s first openly gay student body president. Death threats, predators, and hormonal adolescence… all while his role models died. His 20s led him to “recovery,” where, over 2 decades, he pretended he was a dead person on vacation in life, calming his traumatized nervous system. In the early 2000s, the US Defence of Marriage Act forced him to immigrate to Canada (via his partner’s Indonesia). That drama over, he wondered what point there was to his solipsistic stability. Thankfully, he landed a job in BC’s harm reduction movement, which totally fucked up his recovery. Art making, and especially music, has been a constant companion and serves as a kind of journal where he has charted his transformation from fighting to survive, to being dead in a living world, to navigating the ethics of existing in world on the edge of collapse.