The natural world is rife with metaphor as humans try to make sense of life. We see it in seasons, in the peaks and valleys of a mountain range, in the quiet decay of plants that return to bloom again. For Hillerbrand+Magsamen+Lynn, a mountain is both ascent and repetition, a loop stitched together frame by frame.

*Mountains*, 2025, Hillerbrand+Magsamen+Lynn | Photo by Michael McFadden

The artist duo is a collaborative husband-wife team who’s spent over two decades exploring the relationships between themselves, their family, their home, memories, daily life, and consumerism. In past projects, they’ve quite literally torn down and rebuilt their homes as humorous critique of American life. This year, they opened a survey of their career so far at FotoFest titled nothing is precious, everything is game, an encapsulation of their practice. The exhibition marks both a celebration and a pause: a moment to reflect on how the relationships they’ve documented have changed over time, especially now that their two children have left home.

The intimacy of such a practice, the baring-all of familial joy, strife, pleasure, struggle, is itself a peak, one that leaves the artists looking again to the horizon, to what remains beyond the known.

*Mountains*, 2025, Hillerbrand+Magsamen+Lynn | Photo by Ben Doyle

Onstage, three figures stand in a small constellation of light: husband and wife on either side of a table, and a seated man at the edge, waiting. Large wooden spools scatter the floor, gradually gathered and affixed to the crankie, a centuries-old storytelling device reborn in their hands. Instead of painted paper scrolls, the spools unwind hand-stitched transparencies, each frame captured live by a camera and projected behind them. Light passes through paper as if through skin. The artists work together to guide the transparencies over the lightbox, tender touch beamed onto the screen. A countdown moves with the slides, and as Mountains enters the frame, the seated man begins to speak.

Mountains is a live cinema experimental performance by Hillerbrand+Magsamen+Lynn, the duo in collaboration with playwright Kirk Lynn. As Lynn narrates from the side of the stage, playing audio via a collection of cassettes, Hillerbrand+Magsamen operate the crankie, often moving smoothly in unison, occasionally creating tension as they move out of sync. The performance unfolds as an act of labor and intimacy, a ritual of image, sound, and breath.

Kirk Lynn narrating | Photo by Ben Doyle

The narration that spills forth is accompanied by the drone of insects, the twitter of a bird, light chimes of a ringing phone. The story they tell feels familiar and inevitable: the slow climb toward meaning, the pursuit of something beyond the next ridge. The ascent is always a challenge - finding yourself, raising a family, creating, establishing a career, surviving - and yet each summit reveals another mountain on the horizon. Between Lynn’s phrases, the artists interject softly: reflections on falling, on rituals, on the ways vision collapses the past and future into a single frame.

Each of these is a part of the life we build and path we forge. When we stumble and fall, we recover, taking note of the circumstances, brooding on the memory.

Midway through, a new spool joins the others, a loop rather than a line. Images slide endlessly over one another: a sleeping child, blue tape mountains, the architectural blueprints of their home layered with a mountain range. The loop flickers and overlaps, echoing the cycles of care, creation, and collapse that shape both family and art. The home is studio, performance space, dwelling, and memory at once, each identity folded back into the others.

Within this intimacy, humor threads through like a breath of relief. In their “Farewell Ritual,” the artists offer gifts to the audience: bandages for when you fall, string to tie each other together, a hundred-dollar bill passed from Lynn to an audience member, which he’ll need to be returned someday.

The exchange is both absurd and tender, an acknowledgment of the way generosity and need move in endless return. Even in their descent, the artists resist closure. The crank turns. The images loop. The gesture continues.

When you summit a mountain, you gain insight into what is ahead: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not always know what is above. Perspective is a gift we give to ourselves, one that cannot be revoked or unknown but easily overshadowed. Upon descending a mountain, there is an art to finding your way not by what you can see but by the memory of what you saw from the top.

The mountaintops are the inspiration and aspiration, but the valleys are what make us: where hands meet paper, where light finds its image, where we keep turning the crank, again and again.

Ascension

The Static of the Line