Baking Soda, installation view, Everything Is Precious, Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s 25 year retrospective, FotoFest, Houston, Texas.
Baking Soda
Baking Soda explores memory, absence, and the emotional landscape of the family home. As empty nesters, Hillerbrand+Magsamen transform their house into a laboratory, using toys, kitchen utensils, lights, and other familiar objects to reconnect with memories of raising their children and the life they once shared.
Through sculpture, photography, cyanotypes, video, and occasional AI experimentation, ordinary household materials become instruments for reconstructing the past. Playful arrangements and unexpected transformations evoke the energy of childhood while confronting the passage of time and the changing nature of home.
Baking Soda is an attempt to make memory tangible, to rediscover the extraordinary within the ordinary, and to bring the presence of family back into the spaces they once occupied.
Commissioned Installation, The Ion District, Houston, Texas, 2024
Baking Soda consists of four windows:
The first window displays a large five-foot-diameter mobile made from found objects. As it spins within the space, it is illuminated by a shifting color wheel reminiscent of a 1950s Christmas tree light, transforming the objects into integrated shadows and patterns.
The second window contains three large-scale flat video monitors. Viewers begin to notice that these monitors display a live feed connected to the third window of the installation. Small robotic devices move, click, and rotate on the screens. Things turn on and off, activating as if they have a life of their own in the third window, while the monitors stand like silent guardians—observing, but not participating.
The third and largest window of the installation contains an overwhelming variety of materials. It resembles a kitchen table where a science experiment has gone awry. There are alternative photographic materials, found objects, motorized components, pinwheels blown by fans on timers, light boxes that turn on and off, rotating pedestals, and trash bags inflating and deflating. The window feels like a mad scientist’s experiment spiraling out of control.
The final window is an encapsulated blue plexiglass box filled with white ping-pong balls. Intermittently, as viewers pass by, a powerful fan is triggered, sending the ping-pong balls bouncing around the box in a chaotic flurry—like vinegar and baking soda reacting in an explosion of sound, light, and visuals.
The Ion District, Ion Innovation District, or Rice Innovation District, is a technology park and innovation district in Midtown Houston which was established as a joint initiative between Rice University and the City of Houston. It has also been called the South Main Innovation District.
