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EXPAND

September 4, 2024 –
January 18, 2025

Reilly Gallery, Smith Center for the Arts

Exhibition Opening Details

Meet the Artists & Reception: October 10, 5:00pm – 7:00pm

About the Exhibition

Providence College Galleries is pleased to present EXPAND, a new collaboration between the artistic team Hillerbrand+Magsamen and playwright Kirk Lynn. Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen have explored the relationship between their home, family histories, and daily life for over two decades. Their diverse creative practice—photography, time-based media, sculpture, and performance—celebrates the transformative power and beauty inherent in the everyday. EXPAND features a large-scale video projection and an evolving tapestry of visual and written materials. To create this multi-media installation, the artists extracted and digitally scanned samples of materials found inside the walls of their house. These scans were then manipulated through various AI programs, creating a mesmerizing, experimental video. Lynn’s writing shapes and enhances the narrative, resulting in a collaborative project that grapples with the journey of life and the complexity and potential found in its transitions. Uncanny and poetic, EXPAND invites visitors to slow down and consider our own connections to these ordinary materials and everyday moments through a significant shift in scale and temporality.

Organized by PCG Director Carol Stakenas.

About the Artist

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 amplify their home life as they jump on trampolines, make mountains out of toys, cut holes in their house and build rocket ships in their backyard. 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), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York, NY), Experimental Television Center (Owego, NY), Elsewhere (Greensboro, NC), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX) and Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM). Stephan Hillerbrand is a recipient of two Fulbright Fellowships (Germany) and MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, NH) residency.

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.

Supporters

Funding for this exhibition is provided by the Providence College’s Division of Academic Affairs. In-kind support provided by Providence College’s Department of Art & Art History and Physical Plant.