Houston Duo Hillerbrand+Magsamen Shine at FotoFest

Houstonia’s The Should Checklist tells you about one thing happening in Houston that you just completely can not miss.

Hillerbrand+Magsamen, the working identify of husband-and-wife creative duo Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen, has been a serious a part of Houston’s visible arts scene for the previous 25 years. They’ve proven at galleries large and small all through the town, together with the Museum of Superb Arts, Houston (MFAH), Houston Middle for Up to date Craft, and Houston Middle for Pictures (although they’ve exhibited worldwide, too). But it wasn’t till this 12 months that the pair lastly obtained their long-overdue first profession survey—a loosely chronological summation of their main works and themes—due to their longtime collaborators at FotoFest.

On show at FotoFest’s Silver Avenue Studios headquarters till November 22, Hillerbrand+Magsamen: nothing is treasured, every part is sport displays a playful domesticity, the connection between objects and reminiscence, and the magic and creativeness discovered within the mundane. Notably, it’s additionally one of many few exhibitions of its variety that the long-running pictures group has introduced.

FotoFest government director Steven Evans, who co-curates the showcase alongside affiliate curator Madi Murphy, says the exhibit is very well timed. “It is household and collaboration, and it is bought a really open, heat sensibility to it,” he says. “The Houston art-going public could be very aware of them and their work, however they have not had the prospect to see it multi function place at one time.”

Hillerbrand and Magsamen met whereas attending graduate faculty on the Cranbrook Academy of Artwork in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. After residing in New York Metropolis for some time, they moved to Houston with their two youngsters, solely 3 months and three years outdated on the time. Impressed by the Fluxus motion, which emphasizes humor and experimentation as a protest in opposition to inflexible social and creative guidelines, the couple arrange an in-house studio so they may mother or father and work on the similar time. Artwork, then, was deeply rooted within the new life they had been creating collectively.

“What was attention-grabbing to us was the youngsters, our household, our new lives in Houston, and so we made a really aware selection… We will use our home as a laboratory,” Hillerbrand says. Instantly, facets of their day by day lives—their youngsters, the canine, the errands they needed to run, the chaos of a house overflowing with plastic—“all this stuff grow to be this place to experiment and make artwork.”

Hillerbrand and Magsamen chronicle their efforts to “make the odd extraordinary,” as the previous summarizes it. Although their work isn’t inherently about their youngsters, parenthood, or house life, they’ve used and proceed to make use of what’s in entrance of them because the engine of their creativeness. Cameras are all the time arrange round their home to seize concepts as quickly as they bloom. Now that their youngsters have grown up and moved on to varsity (one research artwork, the opposite engineering), they’ve refocused their sculptures, pictures, movies, and mixed-media items on their present actuality as empty nesters, which they anticipate will metamorphose because the circumstances round them shift. “This [exhibition] clearly demonstrates the phases of life you may undergo—beginning out, assembly one another, the thrill with that, having a household, after which the youngsters leaving the home,” Murphy says. “So, I feel it is actually one thing that is approachable to most people and one thing they recognize on a private degree.”

This preoccupation with ephemerality is most seen of their 2014 Mandala sequence. 9 of the 12 images are on show in nothing is treasured, every part is sport, each depicting a virtually six-foot-wide round sculpture constructed of toys and different family objects. Magsamen says that a lot of her and her husband’s work focuses on the quantity of stuff they’ve gathered over time, particularly after having youngsters. A few of these works are grouped by colour schemes (purple and pink, inexperienced and blue), others by theme (Barbies, Legos, stuffed animals). It’s a meditation on the interaction between consumption and nostalgia, utilizing a historically Buddhist artwork kind characterised by impermanence, typically rendered in sand. These, after all, are created from plastic, paint, and different man-made supplies as an alternative. “We had been taking all of those objects and arranging them in these mandalas in our house as a method to discover peace for them,” Magsamen says.

The duo factors out a few of the objects captured within the pictures which can be nonetheless hanging round their home, every with its personal story—like a ornament from a pet fish’s tank and a single tiny Converse sneaker. Conversely, the wooden ground that serves because the background of some photographs has since been changed. Each the saved and the “launched,” as Magsamen calls the objects, peer into the advanced relationship between accretion and reminiscence. “As guests have been coming by means of the exhibition, they’ve began stating objects which have connections to their lives rising up—toys that they’d as youngsters,” Murphy says. “So, I feel that is form of a pleasant common connection to make as you are strolling by means of the exhibition. It has a way of consolation to it.”

Consolation is one other main theme and the title of a 2013 photograph sequence. Magsamen recounts how she got here house in the future to search out Hillerbrand had crafted a 12-inch-thick wall of their storage door, constructed of random stuff from round their home and stacked like a life-size Tetris sport: a gasoline can, an Avengers lunch field, a tv set, an inflatable horse costume. Magsamen responded with a creation of her personal, stuffing rolled-up blankets, sweaters, sleeping luggage—even canine beds—into their entrance door. For Consolation, images of each site-specific and clearly short-term sculptures had been printed on Walmart blankets slightly than conventional paper. “This stuff that we have been speaking about accumulating, we are able to discover consolation in them, as a result of we have made them right into a blanket,” she says.

Persevering with this theme is certainly one of Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s most well-known works: the salon-style mélange of pictures, sculpture, discovered objects, music, efficiency, video, and blended media generally known as 147 Units for Built-in Rules. Made in collaboration with Austin-based playwright Kirk Lynn from 2017 to 2020, the multifaceted piece, which options excess of 147 units, took place whereas the household ready their first-ever hurricane equipment in anticipation of Harvey’s landfall. Right here, their pictures grow to be extra sculptural, typically involving puncturing and stitching straight into the paper. And their sculptures pushed them towards new and enjoyable methods to experiment, like bedazzling a traditional Little Tikes Cozy Coupe ride-on automotive and displaying it on a rotating stage as if it had been a luxurious automobile. “This present has made my mind soften as a result of it has been so enjoyable to consider all of the issues. The play is not only occurring thematically within the work,” Hillerbrand says. “I feel the play is occurring within the studio.”