Be glad that photos don’t capture a smell.
Elliot Gustafson owns and operates the Cleveland, Texas-based Aphelion Necrology, one of the most innovative parts of the Houston area’s growing oddities art scene. Unlike many of his peers that specialize in preserved insects and other comparatively dry subjects, Gustafson specializes in wet specimens in jars that glow thanks to a chemical dye process.
Naturally, this requires keeping a fair amount of animal corpses around in deep freeze to work on later. When Hurricane Beryl hit last week, Gustafson was one of the 2.2 million people who lost power. He was without electricity for a week before it was finally restored. By then, he had lost everything.
“I had hope still on the second or third day that they would be okay, because a full chest freezer will stay cold for quite a while as long as it is kept shut,” he says. “We’ve lost power a few times before after storms, but never this long and never in weather like this. As the week dragged on and the temps rose, I knew it was going to be too late. It was really devastating to feel so hopeless and not be able to do anything to save so many specimens, especially ones that had been donated to me. One of the biggest reasons I do what I do is to give another purpose to these animals after death, and to lose them like this is such a waste to me. I’m not afraid to admit that I cried over the thought of losing my entire livelihood.”
All told, Gustafson lost around $5,000 worth of specimens. Saddest of all, one was his beloved dog Clancy that passed away in 2023 and who Gustafson was planning on preserving.
Gustafson uses a process called diaphonization in his pieces. Chemical processes make the skin of the animal translucent, allowing the bones and organs to shine through. The internal structures can be colored after that to create unique pieces of art. All of that, now, is pile of “rotting meat soup” waiting to be disposed of alongside broken fences and fallen trees.
To mitigate the loss, Gustafson has launched a GoFundMe campaign. He says he has also reached out to the local oddities community for support and received some help in recovering from the damage.
Like most people in the area, Gustafson is furious at how long it took to get power restored. He is covered by Entergy in Liberty County, not CenterPoint, but watched in anger as friends struggled for days in hot darkness.
“I am absolutely angry and resentful of the mismanagement I saw— trucks of linemen just sitting in parking lots with no orders ” he says. “I am grateful for the actual linemen who worked around the clock doing what they could for days on end. They managed to get things working again despite their management, not because of it. But even now there are still so many people without power and it’s been over a week! This whole fiasco is an embarrassment to Texas.”
Gustafson used a small propane generator at first, but it could not run both the air conditioning and the deep freezer. Choosing to provide a secure environment for his pets, the freezers were sacrificed. Even then, He says fuel became very hard to find as the outages went on.
Even with support, it will likely be some time before Gustafson can rebuild his work.
“This is definitely not the first time someone in the oddities scene has suffered a similar loss,” he says, referring to the arson that ended the Wilde Collection in the Heights. “My biggest advice would be to have a crisis plan in place [an emergency contact or secondary location to move things, ways to preserve frozen specimens quickly, alternate power sources] because you have no idea how fast things can go downhill.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
