Mary Magsamen & Stephan Hillerbrand
Colette Copeland
May 2020
The fifth in a series of conversations with artist couples delving into how they are
surviving the pandemic times.
A Device for Dependence
Email conversation with Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand
CC: How has covid19 and the quarantine impacted your artistic practice both conceptually and technically?
H+M: We were so excited about this spring! Like so many artists, opportunities come in waves. We had been cultivating, planning and pulling things together for a long time, some of them were years in the making or planning.
Then all of sudden things just stopped.
We started to get emails and phone calls cancelling everything, one right after the other. We had never seen anything like it. At one-point we didn’t want to even check our email for fear of the bad news it was going to bring.
As artists, one of the greatest joys we have is to share our work with others. We don’t live in a vacuum. We want others to laugh, cry and think about the same things that we do.While there are so many technical ways for people to communicate to each other and we are excited about so many of them, we do feel a sense of loss in artistic practice right now. This time has made us think very seriously about things that we may have taken for granted before.
We’re very excited about what we’re going to do, but we also feel a loss in the contact we had.
A Device for Silencing
CC: With all the museums and galleries closed, what innovative ways have you found in order to stay connected to art and artists?
H+M: We both joke to each other all the time, that one of the reasons that we fell in love with each other and started collaborating as a team. We are both “shiny object” artists–meaning that we are constantly excited about new ways of making. Once we finish a project, we see a totally different “shiny object” in the distance and we start running after it at full speed.
That’s exactly how are approaching this time as well.
Our performances with Fusebox Festival and exhibition with Big Medium gallery were cancelled and they asked us to make something for the virtual festival which has been a lot of work and a huge learning curve! We had not envisioned doing a virtual project ever before so we have had to shift our thinking and figure out how to adapt. Fortunately, our collaborators Kirk Lynn and Peter Stopschinski have been great about reworking the project. It has been keeping us very busy in the studio which is great – the new piece will happen as a 20-minute interactive Zoom performance followed by 7 days of Instagram interactions with the participants. We made a “tiny Big Medium” and renamed the performance Devices for Preparation and Comfort.
Honestly, we have been so busy with making work for online events, trying to keep our kids on track with their home schooling, maintaining our jobs via email and Zoom, managing all the meals and laundry, and just figuring out this new way of living that we haven’t had much time or energy to dive into all the opportunities that museums, galleries and film festivals are offering for looking at work. There are some really great online things that people are doing, but we often defer to the escape of a bad movie at the end of the day.
A Device to be Heard
CC: What are your strategies for staying sane and not getting homicidal with your partner during these times?
That’s a good question! This has been a lot of together time for us as a family. There have certainly been some arguments.
We have this funny story that happened to us many years ago that we love to tell about being together a lot. We were both in the bathroom getting ready to go to bed one evening. Stephan stopped brushing his teeth and with a concerned look on his face turned and said ”Mary, I’m really concerned that we are growing apart?” Whereupon, Mary stopped brushing her teeth and with an exasperated face said “Are you kidding me?! We are in a relationship together, we have a child together, we teach/work together and we make our art together. We don’t need more time together, we need some time away from each other!” It is such a funny story about how we each saw the same thing so differently. Keeping that balance of time together and apart is definitely a challenge right now.
What we miss the most is our “transition” times. Those quite moments of transition from home to work. Or doing an errand or going shopping. We take those little quite moments for granted as not being important but sitting in the car as you drive home from the grocery store can be this moment of quite or reflection. Even a moment of mediation.
The schedule disruption has been the most difficult thing for us and for our kids. The online learning environment is not so great, but they are trying, and we try to not yell too much…
CC: Have you invented devices for staying sane during a pandemic, for restraining homicidal tendencies towards loved ones and/or for being touched while maintaining social distancing?
It’s the craziest thing! We feel like we are in a weird sci-fi movie or a campy sitcom.
The irony of having so many tools at our disposal, so many problems to figure out and nothing seems to work is exactly what this series was about. All the preparation, trying to figure out how to predict the future, and trying to invent a device to help, but in the end things don’t work – it is an exercise in futility but with hope.
Each day, you have to make the device from scratch. Each day you have to start anew.
We made photographs of the four of us wearing masks with rhinestones on them titled A Device for Fragile Protection. We are hoping that with our Fusebox online performance that people will participate and we can have some new interactions and explorations with the project. There seem to be endless devices that we all need right now! The project began in response to Hurricane Harvey and with Covid-19, there are so many new ways to look at the world and think about ways of coping.
147 Devices for Integrated Principles
Colette Copeland with Francesca Leoni & Davide Mastrangelo →
Colette Copeland with The Brians a.k.a. Chuck & George →
Colette Copeland with Ryder Richards & Sue Anne Rische →
Colette Copeland with Silvia Argiolas & Matteo Campulla →
Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s practice utilizes collaboration, process and media experimentation through videos, photography, installations and interdisciplinary performances. They explore their relationships to each other and society with an uncanny sensibility that merges the real and unreal, blurring boundaries between life and art and often includes their two children, Maddie and Emmett. Stephan Hillerbrand is an Associate Professor at the University of Houston. Mary Magsamen is the Curator at Aurora Picture Show
hillerbrandmagsamen.com →
instagram.com/hillerbrand_magsamen/ →
Colette Copeland is a multimedia visual artist/writer whose work examines gender, death and contemporary culture. Sourcing personal narratives and popular media, she uses video, performance and installation to question societal roles and media’s influence on enculturation. Her experimental videos employ absurdist humor to explore the landscape of human relationships. She loves all things Dada and Fluxus with a healthy does of subversive humor, especially the work of Hillerbrand + Magsamen.
A Device to Remind
Inspired by Hillerbrand+Magsmen’s work
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