Home Balance | Hillerbrand+Magsamen
Part of TIME BEING
Home Balance morphs a children’s bouncy house into a contemporary art project about balance. A large inflatable house is custom built with walls that become glowing film screens, illuminated by videos of a family inside their own home: the artists and their children jumping up and down, breaking things, hitting their heads against the ceiling, knocking over furniture, falling, creating complete havoc. As the private space of the family home is made public for everyone to see, visitors can enter and bounce in the midst of the images. Home Balance questions what constitutes a home, and draws on childhood games to explore how family interactions challenge the desire to maintain orderly control of the structures in which we dwell.
This performance is part of TIME BEING, our inaugural festival of performance taking place during opening weekend.
Home Balance was commissioned for CounterCurrent16 by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston. Additional funding support from the University of Houston Small Projects Grant. The bounce house was fabricated by All-Star Inflatables, Dallas, TX.
ABOUT HILLERBRAND+MAGSAMEN
The artistic team of Hillerbrand+Magsamen is the collaboration of Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen. Together they create sculpture, installation, performance, video and photographic works they call “Suburban Fluxus”. Often including their two children, Madeleine and Emmett in their work, the family critiques and playfully scrutinizes contemporary suburban life.
Hillerbrand+Magsamen have presented their videos in international film and media festivals including Houston Cinema Arts Festival, London SciFi Film Festival, WAND V Stuttgarter Filmwinter, New York Underground Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Boston Underground Film Festival, and MonkeyTown. Their cinematic based installations have been exhibited at the Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), Center for Photography Woodstock (Woodstock, NY), Diffusion Photography Festival (Wales, UK) and Houston Center for Photography (Houston, TX).
They have received grants from Sustainable Arts Foundation, Austin Film Society, Experimental Television Center, Ohio Arts Council, Houston Arts Alliance and Houston Center for Photography. Their project HIGHER GROUND was a commission from the Houston Airport System and received 1st prize from juror Richard Linklater in the CineSpace program at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival.
Hillerbrand+Magsamen have participated in residency programs including: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York, NY), Experimental Television Center (Owego, NY), Elsewhere (Greensboro, NC), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM). Stephan Hillerbrand is a recipient of two Fulbright Fellowships (Germany) and MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, NH) residency.
Mary and Stephan live and work in Houston with their two children, Madeleine and Emmett.
FEATURED IN
The New York Times – Rethinking the Family Portrait
LenScratch – On Collaboration: Hillerbrand+Magsamen