H-E-B Family Night

Come explore our current exhibitions through hands on activities. Kids and parents can make their own projects inspired by artwork on view to take home while enjoying a family friendly evening. Meet the Home Bodies exhibiting artists Hillerbrand+Magsamen and enter their home through the piece Home Balance, a bounce house turned participatory art. The artwork morphs a children’s bouncy house into a contemporary art project about balance presented outdoors for one night only, during Family Night. A large inflatable bouncy house—like the one popping up on your neighbor’s lawn heralding the arrival of a child’s noisy birthday party—is custom built with walls that become glowing film screens. The walls are illuminated by videos of Hillerbrand + Magsamen’s family inside their own home: the artists and their children jumping up and down, breaking things, hitting their heads against the ceiling, knocking over furniture, falling, creating complete havoc. As the private space of the family home is made public for everyone to see, visitors can enter and bounce in the midst of the images. In a bouncy house the goal is to maintain stability in an environment not designed for stability, while our real homes are designed for a stability that our home-life can never attain. Home Balance questions what constitutes a home, and draws on childhood games to explore how family interactions challenge the desire to maintain orderly control of the structures in which we dwell. Home Balance was a commission forCounterCurrent 2016 by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston. Additional funding support from the University of Houston Small Projects Grant. The bounce house was fabricated by All-Star Inflatables, Dallas, TX.