There is a certain charge that comes when artists insist that the stuff of daily life, its toys, its rituals, its messes, belongs on the same stage as monuments and masterpieces. Houston-based collaborators Hillerbrand+Magsamen have been doing this for twenty-five years now, pulling trampolines into bedrooms, building spaceships from plastic, coating Nerf darts in rhinestones, and treating their house as both laboratory and set.
Across video, installation, and performance, Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand have built a language that refuses to separate art from life. Their children grew up inside this language, sometimes literally, pressed into service as actors, conspirators, or reluctant collaborators.
“For them, it was normal to have studio days, or to have us say, ‘Come sit here while we take a picture,’” Magsamen recalled. Hillerbrand added, “When they were little, their involvement wasn’t something we set out to plan. They were just here with us in the house, part of our everyday lives.”
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Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Whole, Video Still, 2012. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Mandala: Legos, 42x42” Archival Pigment Print, 2015. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Expand, 24x36” Archival Pigment Print, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Hillerbrand+Magsamen, House/Hold: Cerberus, 24x36” Archival Pigment Print, 2012. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Higher Ground, Video Still, 2015. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Mountains, Film Still from Crankie, Work in Progress, 2025. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Re/Action, 24x24” Archival Pigment Print and Thread, 2021. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Air Hunger, 20x30” Archival Pigment Print, 2001. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Hillerbrand+Magsamen, A Device to Be Heard, 24x24” Archival Pigment Print, 2019. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Comfort: Garage Outside, 24x30” Archival Pigment Print, 2013. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Hillerbrand+Magsamen, A Device for Emotional Intelligence, 24x24” Archival Pigment Print and Thread, 2019. Image courtesy of the artists.
These stories, tinged with humor, also carry the ache of time’s passage. Their oldest child Luce, once the subject of photographs they took down when their friends came over, is now an art student who occasionally joins them as an illustrator.
“They have a new appreciation for what we were doing, even though as a kid they didn’t like being photographed all the time,” Magsamen said. “Even when the kids aren’t physically in the art, their presence lingers in it.”
The exhibition is both retrospective and renewal. Early projects like Air Hunger— giant pink bubbles made of shared breath—abstract the ordinary into fragile spectacle. Later pieces such as Higher Ground deploy suburban iconography: houses, trampolines, spaceships, all suffused with absurdity and longing. Transformation recurs. Objects are dismantled, reassembled, adorned. No longer what they were, yet familiar still.
The title, nothing is precious, everything is game, names that impulse: a willingness to break things down, to expose mechanics, to remind the viewer that art is both process and play.
For Hillerbrand, this dismantling is a way of showing the seams, placing the projector itself in front of the audience rather than hiding it. Regeneration, not destruction, is the endpoint.
That ethos extends into performance, particularly in Mountains, their new collaboration with playwright Kirk Lynn, premiering Oct. 18 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The work adopts the format of an ancient “crankie,” a scrolling paper image, moved by hand, combined with Lynn’s narration. Together, they stretch and compress time, reversing or halting the story as it unspools. There is a call and response between Hillerbrand and Magsamen, shaping the climb up each metaphorical mountain. It is at once theater, cinema, and experiment.
Collaboration lies at the core of their practice. “I can’t imagine not collaborating with Mary,” Hillerbrand said. “Being a solo artist would feel isolating.”
Hillerbrand+Magsamen have built their process on conversation, on pushing each other, questioning choices, and refining things together. The duo explained that collaborators give them a different lens, a new perspective, sometimes pushing them in uncomfortable but necessary directions.
By binding their family, their home, their objects, and their stories into art, they have created an archive of the everyday that resists erasure. It is a body of work that insists memory is not just held in grand narratives but in trampolines, Nerf darts, toy cars, and bubble gum. And it is an archive that continues to evolve. It spirals, regenerates, finds new forms in old materials, a testament to play, intimacy, and shared experience.
Together they remind us that the ordinary, when looked at closely enough, is never ordinary at all.
—MICHAEL McFADDEN
