Hillerbrand+Magsamen
2025 Aurora Project Residency
Hillerbrand+Magsamen is the collaborative artistic team of Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen, who have been working together for over 20 years. Their practice is deeply rooted in photography and lens-based media. Working in an intuitive call-and-response process, they challenge and expand the boundaries of photographic storytelling, incorporating performance, installation, and video to create layered, time-based narratives.
For the 2025 Project Residency, Hillerbrand+Magsamen plan to further develop their project Second Mountain, which involves a crankie, a centuries-old storytelling device that scrolls hand-illustrated or photographic imagery across a frame. During their two weeks in Indianapolis, the duo will photograph the city’s landscapes, architecture, and everyday objects and use Aurora’s darkroom and digital lab to incorporate these Indianapolis images into two new crankie scrolls.
During the residency, Hillerbrand+Magsamen plan several micro-performances using the new crankie scrolls, allowing local audiences to interact with the project and provide feedback on many aspects of the performance including pacing, sequencing, and emotional impact. They write of the opportunity to work in Indianapolis that, “Additionally, we hope to collaborate with local artists, writers, and performers who can contribute new perspectives to the work. By incorporating local stories and voices, Second Mountain will not only be performed in Indianapolis but also influenced by its people. This residency is an opportunity to create a unique iteration of the work that reflects the city’s energy, history, and community, deepening the connection between photography, performance, and place.”
Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s projects engage themes of family, identity, and contemporary consumer culture with a mix of humor and sincerity. Their photographic and video works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Fotofest Biennial, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and festivals such as Currents New Media and the Edinburgh Art Festival. They have received support from institutions such as Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
As they prepare for major upcoming exhibitions, including a 20-year retrospective at the Fotofest Biennial and a show at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, they are continuing to push the language of photography and lens-based media into new conceptual and material directions. Through their dynamic and evolving practice, Hillerbrand+Magsamen invite viewers to reconsider the role of images in shaping personal and collective narratives.
The Aurora Project Residency would not be possible without the following partnership.
Pending scheduling, the residents will stay at Tube Factory Artspace in their artist bed and breakfast located on Cruft Street in the Garfield Park area of Indianapolis. Aurora PhotoCenter thanks Tube Factory Artspace for its generous support of this residency.
