On View: September 4 – October 15
Opening Reception: Friday, September 4 from 5-8pm at Chicago Artists Coalition
“Wherever you go, there you are.”
“It ain’t over till it’s over.”
“He who is meant to be a basket-carrier is born with the handle in his hand.”
The intended meaning of a proverb or idiom should be self-evident. Something has happened, an unwanted outcome has materialized, and these familiar phrases offer a way to make peace with it in order to move on. Passed down from the likes of Confucius, Solomon, and goodreads.com, they promise wisdom, purpose, or direction when certainty feels out of reach.
The Portuguese proverb “All is fish that comes to the net” could be dismissed as just another platitude, another version of “It is what it is.” But, viewed from another angle, it proposes an ethic of agency rather than resignation. It asks: How do we turn what we are given into what we need and honor it?
All Is Fish That Comes to the Net brings together fragmented objects, inherited ideas, and materials displaced from their original contexts and reassembled into new ones. Viewers are invited to linger with the contradictions, misreadings, and unlikely connections presented to them and imagine the hand behind purposefully reimagining each object and thought. Rather than presenting fixed meanings, the works ask how observation and defamiliarization can be a transformative tool used in any creative act.
Through photography, sculpture, assemblage, and material exploration, Sebastian Bruno-Harris, Rob Croll, Nick D’Alessandro, and Van Payne each engage the found object and the proverb as a method of thinking. Their practices treat collection, reuse, and reinterpretation not simply as aesthetic strategies, but as ways of navigating history, memory, and meaning. Like the proverb that gives the exhibition its title, the works are evidence that what arrives in our lives—whether by chance, inheritance, or accident—can always become an answer to our questions.
Sebastian Bruno-Harris is a visual artist who makes mixed-media sculptures and assemblages out of everyday objects and materials. At the core of his practice is a desire to harness the feeling you get when you look at something ordinary that strikes you as new and strange. His works aim to provide methods for noticing and contemplating the endless, kaleidoscopic ways in which things are connected – be they objects, thoughts, feelings, impressions, or dreams. Born in Puerto Rico and raised across Buenos Aires and South Florida, Bruno-Harris received his BFA from Florida Atlantic University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department. He was an artist-in-residence at Chicago Art Department from 2020-2021 and most recently at Chicago Artist Coalition from 2025-2026. In 2025 Sebastian was named one of Newcity’s Breakout Artists of the year. His works have been exhibited at the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County, Fritz Gallery, West Palm Beach; Leidy Gallery, Baltimore; Chicago Art Department, Co-Prosperity, Chicago Artist Coalition, and Hyde Park Art Center.
In his recent work, Rob Croll examines the politics of space and the unstable relationships between landscape, body, architecture, and image. Drawing from a background in improvised music, he applies the idea of extended technique to the camera, often purposefully misusing the technologies and materials of photography in search of novel ways to represent a subject.
Nick D’Alessandro (b. Massachusetts) is a Chicago-based artist focusing on industry and subsequent disposal practices. His work draws from the events of planned obsolescence, collecting the objects of its disregard. In approaching a fiber context, the materiality of the objects studied becomes centered, and honored in light of their exhausted utility. Investigating extraction systems as a catalyst for land destruction, digital colonialism, and material reuse within the textile industries, he asks what the aesthetics of these essential materials offer a throwaway society, and looks for the point at which an object becomes waste.
Van Payne (b. 2001) is a black-filipino american artist working between painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture. She received her BFA from the School of the Art institute Chicago and is the recipient of the Magdalena Abakanowicz Fellowship and Buonanno-Smith Scholarship. Payne assembles objects to navigate the interstice of mixed-race identity, patriotism and the contradictions birthed by their union. “The American conception of Blackness is to exist in a state of calculation, seeking ways to pacify the past within oneself. I reckon with a chasm that lies between our collective understanding of visibility against representation.” Reckon: to calculate or settle accounts. In her practice, Payne considers the many divisions she inhabits and works to produce images that reflect her experience of the visual narrative. Here, she settles on how objects, materials and assembled contexts can re-member the history that lives within her. Payne currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Taj Richardson (b. The Bronx, NY, 1999) is an artist, designer, and curator currently based in Chicago with an interest in rendering and analyzing imaginative spaces through multiple mediums. Influenced by his relationship with escapism and memories, Taj combines analog/traditional methods with digital programs to create intimate moments between people and spaces. Taj’s curatorial and editorial practice uses analysis to construct narratives through conceptual and spatial interventions. He earned a BFA and a B.Arch from Rhode Island School of Design where he studied architecture and printmaking in 2022.