STUFFED
brand10andXFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 5, 2013
FORT WORTH, Texas - brand 10 + and x art space presents Stuffed: Hillerbrand + Magsamen which runs from January 25 – March 23, 2013 with an opening reception to be held on Friday January 25 from 5 - 9pm at both art spaces. Stuffed highlights the works of Houston artist couple Hillerbrand + Magsamen with selected works in video, photography and sculpture addressing tangled web of consumer culture and family values from a personal viewpoint where art and life are intermingled.
Hillerbrand and Magsamen state:
“As a collaborative artistic team, we draw upon the rich Fluxus practice of incorporating humor, performance, video and everyday objects. We expand our 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 our objects and possessions of self, family and culture, the role of the camera in contemporary art and challenges presumptions of the everyday.
With an interest in multidisciplinary presentations involving 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 underconstructed 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.
It is our hope that our work speaks to the deep ambivalence of suburban life—that one can love one’s life, one’s possessions, one’s husband and wife, one’s children—but still wonder what might have been. If you are brave enough to speak about it, then you can admit that the same longing we are taught for a nice house and nice things has implications for our other loves. It is difficult to live in longing, to always want something new, to wonder: if I did not have this life, would I be happier? As artists we are willing to question and present our own lives. Our work is an extended family trip down the rabbit hole, tunneling through myths and realities, with no end in sight, but strength in our companions, and our journey.”
Image: Comfort by Hillerbrand+Magsamen, 2012 - 50"X60", Photo Printed On Fleece
Stuffed is organized by the brand 10 + and x art space founders and team of collaborative artists/curators and they are: Heagan Bayles, Christine Bisetto, Matthew Clark and Kathy Webster.
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Reader Comments (1)
Your ideas sound perfect for this essay. If you've done any leadership or volunteer stuff you may want to include that as well, but what you have is excellent.