Mary Magsamen + Stephan Hillerbrand Transcendental Smoothie

“Whipped cream galaxies,

Life sized psychedelic toddler tantrums and

Devoured peanut butter and jelly faces…

Navigation is hard. It is hard to navigate around your family, the art world, work and even which isle to go down in the movie rental store. Navigating around how you treat people and how people treat you is even more complex. Our daily lives revolve around navigation; the navigation of politics, faith, how to raise children and how to not to get angry at how your partner brushes their teeth.

Transcendental Smoothie is about navigation.”

The collaborative husband/wife team of Mary Magsamen + StephanHillerbrand met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art where they received their MFAs. Their work has been exhibited in galleries, museums and film/video festivals internationally. They received an Ohio Arts CouncilAward and a Carol Crow Fellowship from the Houston Center for Photography. Hillerbrand is a NEA recipient, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a two-time Fulbright Fellow. They live in Houston with their two children. Their work is about relationships, perception and their daily interactions with each other—it is a portrait of their life together. Their collaborative process includes experimentation with video, light, sound and performance. They make portraits of their everyday life that go beyond documentation because of innovative manipulations of time, image and material. These new interpretations of the everyday visual vocabulary such as cookies, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or their children engage the viewer with mesmerizing and visceral abstraction. Magsamen+ Hillerbrand show the familiar to us in an unfamiliar and cinematic way.