Sebastian Bruno-Harris/Photo: Maria Burundarena

I once knew a mother with two boys who refused to buy them toy weapons in hopes of raising peaceable citizens, but gave up when they started to chew their toast into the shape of guns and shoot each other across the table. Desire and the most modest resemblance, as E.H. Gombrich explored in his 1963 essay “Meditations on a Hobby Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form,” is more than enough for the imagination to produce a serviceable substitute for our longings. The nature of the longing that drives an artist to make work dramatically shapes the content of the work. And somewhere in the synaptic gap between the artist’s longings and those of the viewer a light of recognition is born. How far from resemblance an artwork can stray before it loses traction in another human psyche will depend upon the shared character of our wishes.Sebastian Bruno-Harris “Bracket Axon Salad Knots” (detail) 2024, mixed-media assemblage installation with photos, 8 x 10 x 12 feet/Photo: Maria BurundarenaSebastian Bruno-Harris “Scintillation III” 2020, acrylic transfer, paper pulp, tape, and TFT display, 9 x 12 x 1 inches/Photo: Sebastian Bruno-Harris

Sebastian Bruno-Harris is the kind of artist who could make an uncomfortable but habitable home in any number of disciplines: ceramics, film studies, sculpture, painting, installation, flower arrangement, assemblage, craft, architecture, design… Turned away from the sculpture program at SAIC, Bruno-Harris attended the Maryland Institute College of Art for a year, but rather than finish his degree, he followed his partner Mariela Acuna, director of exhibitions and residency at the Hyde Park Art Center, to Chicago. After a year in residence at the Chicago Art Department in Pilsen, he was accepted into the film department at SAIC based on his work with video embedded into painting-like wall pieces composed of collaged and altered image transfers. He expanded his visibility in Chicago with recent exhibitions at Chicago Art Department, Hyde Park Art Center, and Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Sebastian Bruno-Harris, “Station Continuum” 2023, mixed-media assemblage installation with photos and videos, 8 x 12 x 5 feet / 02:07 mins / 09:22 mins/Photo: Jonas Mikosch

Bruno-Harris’ cross-cultural roots in Buenos Aires and the United States underlie his inquiry into the nature of home, groundedness, assimilation and cross-pollination. It is not immediately evident in many of his works what material he is working with nor how it may have arrived at its current state. But less a facile dismissal of material-based disciplinary boundaries, we as the viewers get to decide what manner of identity is in question as the constructions appear suspended in mid-evolution. Ceramic vessels, dried flowers held in place with small wooden scaffolds, grape stems, woven baskets dipped in wax, screen, netting, bits of wood raw and painted, melted glass crystallized like icicles on the end of a branch call to mind the constructions of nest-building creatures. The tenderness of such delicate gestures has the provisional character of a sapling. The odds are stacked against them reaching full maturity, like a maple seedling creeping through a crack in the sidewalk, but their grit is astonishing.

Sebastian Bruno-Harris, “Model for a Run-on Stanza,” 2022, mixed-media assemblage sculpture with photos, 7 x 3 x 3 feet/Photo: Sebastian Bruno-Harris

We learn that some of these objects came through collaborative procedures or “jam sessions,” as Bruno-Harris calls them, with other artists armed with their own arsenal of wishes, materials and objects ready to comingle with others like parents passively observing their toddlers at play. Collaboration can muddy the waters of authorial clarity, a problem that has long befuddled the art market, but it can also amplify the work’s strangeness.

When a child chews his toast into the shape of a gun not having a substitute ready to hand, or a broomstick becomes a horse, it is in part because the resemblance is close enough, and because shooting matters. The intensity of the longing necessitates invention. So what matters to a composer of architectural flower arrangements and diorama-like displays of varied and ambiguous objects? Maybe the possibility of a broad enough conception of identity in which the spectrum between independence and intimacy can be honored.

Sebastian Bruno-Harris, “Arrangement for a Fragile Exchange,” 2020, plywood, acrylic transfers, tape, house paint, plaster, PLA filament, and found objects, 57 x 12 x 12 inches/Photo: Sebastian Bruno-Harris

As the relationship guru Esther Perel asserts, we are either more worried about losing the other or of losing ourselves and our attachment patterns play out accordingly. This strikes me as true whether applied to the problem of maintaining diverse cultures under a national banner or to a personal relationship. The fragile balance of keeping both in sight is a problem at the core of all questions of identity, and one evoked in Bruno-Harris’ work both in its material diversity and its delicacy. But what I find refreshing in the work is that I am granted the freedom to wonder about the identity of a grape stem rather than of Sebastian Bruno-Harris whose complexity emerges organically rather than through assertion.

We could imagine the whole of creative production as a wish factory, a practice of sharpening the collective wishing tool into a sturdy enough vehicle to carry us into an unknown future. And if we are to escape the fate of being the servants of our more destructive desires, we rely on the arts to compose a compelling enough picture to want to move toward it. Bruno-Harris, in his voracious appetite for material exploration and his gentle sensitivity, pictures something worth wishing for. (John Preus)