ART! EXPAND, Hillerbrand+Magsamen and Kirk Lynn – Reilly Gallery, Providence College

Providence College Galleries is pleased to present EXPAND, a new collaboration by the artistic team Hillerbrand+Magsamen and playwright Kirk Lynn. The exhibition will be on view in Reilly Gallery
now through January 18, 2025.

The exhibition is a mixed-media installation featuring a large-scale video projection and an evolving tapestry of visual and written materials. Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s mesmerizing images, accompanied by playwright Lynn’s writing, explore the transformative power found in the everyday through a significant shift in scale and temporality.

For over two decades, Hillerbrand+Magsamen have created work that explores the connections between their home life—encompassing house and family—histories, memories, and consumerism. Their multidisciplinary practice, which spans photography, time-based media, sculpture, and performance, reveals both wonder and possibility found within the fabric of daily life.

“We have a long history of working together and literally tearing down and rebuilding our physical environments to playfully critique our lives,” commented Hillerbrand+Magsamen. For this exhibition, they punched holes in the walls of their 1960-built house to extract and digitally scan samples of foam insulation, nails, and other materials found inside. Then, utilizing multiple AI programs, the artists processed the scans into time-based media layered with audio field recordings to produce a mesmerizing and uncanny single-channel video.

Inspired by the boundary-breaking experimentation of Fluxus artists during the 1960s and 1970s, their creative practice embraces intermedia tactics, collage techniques, a love of mail art, and a commitment to collaboration.

For this project, they invited Lynn to join an emergent process. In dialogue with the artists, Lynn has created prompts and writings that respond to the artists’ collaborative work and life. His texts shape the video’s narrative and are echoed in the materials Hillerbrand+Magsamen are making and periodically mailing to the gallery. These dispatches containing photographs, transparencies, household objects, and Lynn’s writings will gradually fill the six exploration zones, reflecting the ongoing collaboration and the project’s iterative nature.

Collectively, Hillerbrand+Magsamen+Lynn seek to open up the art process, extending beyond their exchanges. They invite visitors to consider responding to a prompt and embark on one’s own exploration. Discover how the familiar patterns in our daily experiences, often overlooked, can reveal deeper insights. How might this poetic experimentation transform how we perceive our everyday world, relate to others, and navigate our roles within broader social systems?

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Hillerbrand+Magsamen is the collaborative art practice of Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand. They live in Houston, TX and have worked collaboratively for over 20 years on videos, photography, installations, and interdisciplinary performances. They work with process and embrace the unpredictable. As momentary experiences become magnified through their diverse practice, the viewer is given insights into the edges of their world. They are not interested in fitting into a defined box, but rather expanding boxes through collaboration with others and experimentation. Balancing humor and tension, they explore their relationships to each other and society with an uncanny sensibility that merges the real and unreal.

Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s work has been presented at festivals, including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX), CounterCurrent Festival (Houston, TX) and Diffusion Photography Festival (Wales, UK). Exhibitions include the Grand Rapids Art Museum (Grand Rapids, MI), Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), and Center for Photography Woodstock (Woodstock, NY). They have received
grants from Sustainable Arts Foundation, Austin Film Society, Houston Arts Alliance and Experimental Television Center and participated in residency programs: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York, NY), Experimental Television Center (Owego, NY), Wassaic Projects (Wassaic, NY), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), I-Park (East Haddam, CT), Experimental Television Center (Owego, NY), Elsewhere (Greensboro, NC), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX) and Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM).

Kirk Lynn is a novelist and playwright living in Austin, TX with his wife, the poet Carrie Fountain, and their children, Olive and Judah. In 2015, Kirk’s debut novel, Rules for Werewolves was published by Melville House. In 2023 Kirk’s first feature film, What Happens Later, produced by 10 Acre Films, was released in theaters. Kirk is one of five artistic directors of the Rude Mechs theatre collective. Kirk is also the Head of Playwriting at the University of Texas at Austin where he specializes in teaching creativity through the anthropology of play, fostering positive mischief in students and colleagues. He is the recipient of multiple grants and awards including Creative Capital, MacDowell Fellow, an NEA New Play Development grant for I’ve Never Been So Happy, and he was named one of the United States Artists Jeanne and Michael Klein Fellows for the category of Theater Arts.

ABOUT PROVIDENCE COLLEGE GALLERIES
Providence College Galleries [PCG] is committed to museum-quality presentations of the art and artists of our time. PCG operates in two exhibition spaces, online, and in public spaces across the College’s campus and throughout the city of Providence. PCG champions dynamic visual arts productions that foster public engagement, life-long learning in the arts, and cultural exchange at local, national, and international levels. PCG ultimately strives to produce projects by artists and thinkers who demonstrate how and why creative practitioners are vital forces in promoting diversity and shaping contemporary global culture.

For more information about PCG, visit: www.pcgalleries.providence.edu.
GENERAL INFORMATION
Providence College Galleries–Reilly Gallery at Smith Center For the Arts Providence College
www.pcgalleries.providence.edu
Hours: Mon-Fri, 11am-6pm;
Sat 11am-4pm
EXPAND is organized by Carol Stakenas, Director & Chief Curator of Providence College Galleries.

For more information or to schedule a tour, email [email protected]