Artist Statement
The collaborative artistic team of Hillerbrand+Magsamen have presented their videos and cinematic based installations internationally at museums, galleries and film festival. Their work draws upon the rich Fluxus practice of incorporating humor, performance, video and everyday objects. Expanding their personal family life with their two children Madeleine and Emmett 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.
Process Statement
With an interest in photography and video, our highly intimate work explores our own relationships, family, and everyday activities, reflecting the contradictions of suburban family life–its pleasures and discontentments, our love-hate relationships with the things we possess and the people we live with. Our work has always been grounded in performance and self-portraiture, exclusively using our home as a stage set and our family as the actors. Fusing contemporary social situations with tropes from Greek legends and Shakespearean dramas, we have attempted to interrogate the notion of family by mythologizing our own.
“I hope you're not planning to sell your house anytime soon.” This is what people often say when they first see our work at art openings, exhibition talks, or film festivals. While they could be commenting on our nominal status as not-so-starving artists, it is more likely that they’re referring to the nature of our work itself. Home, family, belongings—nothing in our life is left un-deconstructed in our art—often quite literally, as sofas, bedroom walls, and dinnerware come under physical attack. We draw no line between our lives and our art. We are the photographers and the photographed; our home is our canvas, our family is our subject, and our actions are our content.
They live and work in Houston, TX with their two children Madeleine and Emmett.
The collaborative artistic team, 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. Their experimental video and installation projects draw upon the rich Fluxus practice of incorporating humor, performance, video and everyday objects, Hillerbrand+Magsamen expand 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 prestigious international film and media festivals including SCOPE Basel, WAND V Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Currents 2010, Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, New York Underground Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Boston Underground Film Festival, LA Freewaves New Media Art Festival, Carnegie Museum of Art, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Dallas Video Festival and have presented their work twice at the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas.
Their cinematic based installations have been seen in such notable institutions as 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, Butler Institute of American Art, Lawndale Art Center and Houston Center for Photography.
They have been awarded residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York and Experimental Television Center, Owego, NY as well grants from Austin Film Society’s Texas Filmmakers’ Production Fund, Ohio Arts Council, Houston Arts Alliance and a Carol Crow Fellowship from the Houston Center for Photography.
They live and work in Houston, TX with their two children Madeleine and Emmett.