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 nearly 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 with which he has charted his transformation from fighting to survive, to being dead in a living world, to navigating the ethics of existing in world at the edge of various catastrophes.
Statement of Reflective Practice
I’ve always made art. For me, it is a practice. Sharing it, too, is a practice. Even if I have no audience, creating for an audience allows me to shine the light of exposure on my practice—to keep it nimble and self-aware, challenging and aware of the ever-present danger of trying to exist as a being who is unafraid of there being a consequence… an outcome… however small or inconsequential… a consequence of my existence. Why do anything if not with the intent of some effect of consequence?
So, my work is a form of reflective practice.
What appears here is exploratory by design—philosophical, associative, and creative rather than declarative. It is an ongoing inquiry into subjectivity, memory, emotion, language, and systems: how experience is metabolized, how meaning is made, and how individuals locate themselves within social and institutional environments without ever fully standing outside them.
The narratives, metaphors, and scenes that arise are not case material, clinical accounts, or representations of identifiable individuals or events. They are not portraits of clients, patients, colleagues, or specific workplaces. When the work borrows from lived experience, it does so through compression, displacement, and symbolic transformation—methods common to reflective and artistic practice—rather than documentation or reportage.
This work does not offer diagnosis, treatment, or clinical guidance, nor does it attempt to adjudicate or evaluate particular organizations, professions, or systems. When institutions, roles, or bureaucratic dynamics appear, they function as conceptual terrain rather than targets: places where power, care, adaptation, and survival can be examined without collapsing into judgment or prescription.
Reflection here is not aimed at resolution. It is a process rather than a conclusion. Contradictions are allowed to coexist. Tonal shifts, humor, provocation, and uncertainty are used intentionally—not to confuse, but to surface assumptions and make visible the movement of internal states as they unfold. What may read as instability is more accurately an effort to remain responsive rather than fixed.
This work exists alongside, not in place of, professional practice. Ethical responsibilities, confidentiality, boundaries, and role distinctions are respected and remain intact. The purpose of this material is personal and philosophical: to stay awake to experience, to notice how feeling and meaning travel through the body and the mind, and to continue practicing the difficult art of paying attention—especially where consequence is possible.