Steve Brudniak

Steve Brudniak (born April 9, 1961, Topeka, Kansas) is an American artist, actor, filmmaker and musician. Known for highly crafted, unusual assemblage sculpture, imbued with transcendental and unique scientific elements; his visual art career spans over four decades, with work in the permanent collections of several art museums in United State. His acting and film endeavors began at the age of 13. Some notable roles include pivotal characters in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and Robert Rodriguez’s Hypnotic. Brudniak was also a founding member of Spiny Normen and other psychedelic music groups from 1977 ‒ present and operated Victorian Recording Studio during the mid 1980’s. He spent his elementary, high school years, and early 20’s in Houston, Texas, eventually moving to Austin, Texas where he currently lives.

Art


During the 1980s Brudniak was an active member of the Houston Alternative Art scene and represented by four different galleries during this time. In 1988 he moved to Austin, Texas, Texas, where he continues to work from his Bouldin Creek studio. His art has been included well over 100 exhibitions, and is in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Antonio Museum of Art; Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; El Paso Museum of Art; Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont; and Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. In 2008 his Astrogeneris Mementos became the first assemblage sculptures exhibited in outer space, taken aboard the International Space Station by entrepreneur and astronaut Richard Garriott.

Brudniak's assemblages engage the phenomena of consciousness through applications of experimental phenomenal media, incorporating, often pioneering, unconventional and scientific elements such as high voltage electricity, gyro mechanics, combustion, ultraviolet, laser, optical and fiber optic technologies, as well as the oldest known geological and living preservations. His 1987 Imogene Icon (collection of San Antonio Museum of Art) is considered the earliest application of a Tesla coil incorporated into a permanent sculpture and his 1991 sculpture The Saturated Well of Baptism, the first to use magnetic ferrofluid in a sculptural context.

Filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro writes, “Each of Steve Brudniak’s artifacts is a relic from a time that never was, and each of them holds a secret. Through superb craftsmanship and a keen eye for design, Brudniak integrates science and technology into his sculptures: ...groundbreaking uses of retro tech shock, produce lightning, induce hypnosis, reflect impossible images and light and produce sound through interaction. Liquids miraculously come alive. Other works amaze merely with their unprecedented content and exquisite form. Brudniak fabricates, manipulates or re-shapes found materials into absolutely coherent, powerful works of art.”

His integration of found objects in the construction of art differs from collage by appearing to be operational machines or ritualistic implements that operate on psychological and spiritual levels. In her 1992 ARTnews review, Elizabeth McBride elaborates: “The landscape he has created with his latest sculptures is dark, frightening, reminiscent of ancient sacrificial structures and torture chambers. And although they are assemblages, they resemble real objects that at some time might have really existed. Thus the physical beauty of Brudniak's work is balanced by the horror of obsession, addiction, and captivity. Caught in such conflicts, we feel danger is everywhere…Brudniak achieves a powerful, exquisite range not only with real objects-how easy to slip into the trap, how difficult to climb out—but with illusions, whose most potent effects are created not in the gallery but in the internal world that each of us inhabits.” Arts writer and curator Anjali Gupta observes, “His explorations of the self and the subconscious become deliberately and elaborately inscrutable vaults for the unknowable. He invalidates the deductive reasoning associated with scientific hypotheses in his conceptual approach but mollifies it in the aesthetic outcome. Brudniak tilts referentiality without mollifying it; rather, he encrypts it.”

His Treatise, Saving Beauty: The Painful Rebirthing of Visual Aesthetic in Contemporary Art, is a scolding commentary on the diminishing importance of visual beauty and craft in postmodern, contemporary art.

Art Books and Documentaries
The monograph, The Science of Surrealism - Assemblage Sculpture of Steve Brudniak was published in 2013 documenting thirty years of the artist's career in photos, essays and commentary. It was edited by Anjali Gupta, with a foreword by Guillermo del Toro and is in 99 public, university, and museum libraries worldwide. Books and documentaries featuring Brudniak's work are listed in the bibliography below.

Art books

 * Bunch, Robert Craig. Dreams, Visions, Other Worlds: Interviews with Texas Artists. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2024
 * Webbernick, Gary. 100 Texas Sculptors. Austin, TX: Texas Sculpture Group, 2024
 * Bunch, Robert Craig, The Art of Found Objects: Interviews with Texas Artists. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2016.
 * Chemeketa College Art Faculty. Art for Everyone, Salem, Oregon: Chemeketa Press, 2016.
 * Gupta, Anjali ed., The Science of Surrealism - Assemblage Sculpture of Steve Brudniak. Austin TX: Merrid Zone, 2013
 * Del Toro, Guillermo and Zicree, Marc. Guillermo Del Toro - Cabinet of Curiosities. London, England: Titan Books, 2013
 * Brenner, Wayne Alan. Minerva’s Wreck: Austin Arts Anthology, Austin TX: Café Armageddon, 2010.
 * Branwyn, Gareth. Device Volume 2: Reconstructed, San Diego, CA: IDW Publishing, July 2009.
 * Reese, Becky Duval. Texas 100: Selections from the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX: El Paso Museum of Art Foundation, 2006.
 * Otten, William G. and Michelle W. Locke. The Legacy Continues, Corpus Christi, TX: Art Museum of South Texas, 2006.
 * Morton, Jennifer. Belong: A TV Journalist's Search for Urban Culture: from Beirut to Bamako, from Havana to Ho Chi Minh City: Stories and Photos. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Insomniac Press, 2004.
 * Greene, Alison de Lima. Texas: 150 Works from the Museum of Fine Arts. NY, NY: Harry N. Abrams, October 1, 2000.
 * Burns, Gerald. Shorter Poems. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, May 1993.
 * Hendricks, Patricia D. and Becky Duval Reese. A Century of Sculpture in Texas 1889-1989. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989.
 * McEvilley, Thomas. Another Reality. Houston, TX: Hooks-Epstein Galleries, June 1989.

Art documentary

 * Ulteriaphobia: The Art of Steve Brudniak. Dir. Luke Savisky. Austin, TX: Klaus und Hans Productions, 1995, Video documentary.
 * Indie Live Austin. “Steve Brudniak: Interview with Diana Brochin.” Austin, TX: ACTV, January 2010.
 * Steve Brudniak – Noumenon. Dir. Wiley Wiggins. Austin, TX: 2008, Video documentary.
 * Steve Brudniak. Dir. Andrew Nourse. Austin, TX: Andy Nourse Productions, 1998 Video documentary.

Film
Brudniak began acting in and directing his own short films at the age of 13 and has appeared in over 50 films, notably Richard Linklater's Waking Life and Robert Rodriguez's Red 11 and Hypnoitic; in video production and television shows including the Reelz Channels Murder Made Me Famous, AMC's The Son and El Rey Network's Rebel Without a Crew. In 2009 he produced, acted in and co-directed Eric Frodsham's Moments The Go feature film. Brudniak is also a voice actor for video games, narration, animation and radio and television commercials. He has appeared in advertising for Ford, PNC Bank, LegalZoom, Mido Lotto, Texas Tourism, Capital One, Indian Motorcycle, Cox Business and others. (See Actor Website under external links below for complete filmography)

Filmography
Selected films

Selected television

Selected voice over

Music
In 1976 he and guitar player Gerry Diaz formed the psychedelic rock group Spiny Normen and recorded an album at the Alvin Community College which was released four decades later on RidingEasy Records in 2018, with Brudniak on keyboards, flute, vocals, and some drums tracks. In 1981 he opened the Victorian Recording Studio in Houston, recording many of Houston's alternative, metal, folk, skate and punk groups. He also recorded and performed as a drummer in several bands in both Houston and Austin. He continues to record with Diaz in an experimental effort called Psylobison, playing theremin and Wavetech sound wave generator.