Hillerbrand + Magsamen
Hillerbrand + Magsamen are a collaborative husband and wife visual artist team made up of Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen. Based in Houston, Texas their work draws upon the rich Fluxus practice of incorporating humor, performance, video and everyday objects. Expanding their personal family life into a contemporary art conversation AbOUT family dynamics, suburban life and American consumer excess.
Art
The collaborative artistic team of Hillerbrand + Magsamen draws upon the rich Fluxus practice of incorporating humor, performance, video and everyday objects. Expanding their personal family life into a contemporary art conversation about family dynamics, suburban life and American consumer excess. This new kind of “suburban fluxus” generates work that documents and re-contextualizes their objects and possessions of self, family and culture, the role of the camera in contemporary art and challenging presumptions of the everyday.
Hillerbrand + Magsamen have presented their videos in international film and media festivals including SCOPE Basel, WAND V Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, New York Underground Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Boston Underground Film Festival, LA Freewaves New Media Art Festival and Currents Media Festival. Their cinematic based installations have been seen in Hong Gah Museum in Taiwan, the Hudson River Museum, Woodstock Center for Photography, Museum of Fine Art Houston, Light Factory Contemporary Museum of Photography and Film, and Houston Center for Photography.
Mentions about their work have appeared in The New York Times, Glasstire, The Houston Press, culturemap.com
Notable works
Well known titles include:
- Whole is a single channel video that embarks on an epic adventure, this family creates new levels of interaction, communication and exploration by breaking and [...] holes into their actual home to make a habitrail-like environment where they go nowhere fast.
- House/hold, a series of 20 Archival Pigement Prints, 20"x28", Edition 1/3. The House/hold photograph series are portraits of our family that playfully capture slices of our daily life with surreal viewpoints and dark humor inspired by actual events from bath time to laundry.
- DIY Love Seat, is a playful single channel video that reinterprets our family and its identity. In this dark comedy a woman takes the family couch and cuts out a section with a chainsaw.
- Accumulation, is a single channel video where an a child dangles in a dark void and then a couple piles up tons of stuff from their garage: lawn mower, toys, tools, Christmas lights, and more into a mountain that they climb up as a means to get to another space.
- Coffee & Milk, is an experimental video that transforms the most basic and everyday items into something larger-than-life. This becomes a metaphor for our physical and psychological space, which is incessantly fluxing between turmoil and tranquility.
- Air Hunger comes from a medical condition, Kussmaul Breathing, which is the rapid, deep, and labored breathing of people who are in a diabetic coma. Kussmaul Breathing is also referred to as air hunger. The project, air-hunger explores issues of communication, sexuality and trust in relationships through the metaphor of what is traditionally scene as a children’s activity, chewing bubble gum.
Awards
- The Lawndale Art Center Residency in Houston, Texas (2010)
- Texas Filmmakers’ Production Fund grant (2010)
- Houston Arts Alliance, Individual Artists Grant (2009)
- Carol Crow Fellowship from the Houston Center for Photography in Houston, TX (2008)
- Fuse Box Collaboration Series, Refraction Arts (2008)
- Fulbright Junior Scholar Fellowship (2006)
- Ohio Arts Council, Individual Creativity Award in Media Installation (2005)
- Experimental Television Center Residencies in Owego, NY (2003 and 2005)
- Lower Manhattan Cultural Council at the Woolworth Building in New York, NY (2004)
- MacDowell Colony Fellow in Peterborough, NH (2001)
Personal lives
Hillerbrand + Magsamen have worked together since meeting in graduate school at the Cranbook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan where they both received their MFAs. They live and work in Houston, TX with their two children. Mary Magsamen is the Curator of the micro-cinema, The Aurora Picture Show and Stephan Hillerbrand is an Associate Professor in the Digital Media Program at The University of Houston and a Honors College Fellow.
Bibliography
- Madeline Schwartzman, See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception, Black Dog Publishing, June 28, 2011.ISBN 1907317295