View these photos on flickr.com...

On June 1st, 2006 we welcomed Justin, Leah, Emily, and Brian to the brand new Hub-Bub Building to "Live Free and Create" as part of our first "class" of artists-in-residents.

Exhibit opening: July 6, 7:00pm. Emily's reading: 7:30pm.

Leah Brown, sculpture

I am a person who constantly questions the nature of reality. What is real and what is not, and the very definition of reality. When a child wakes from a nightmare, she is comforted by parents who tell her: itís not real, itís only a dream, this, here, now: this is real. But what I wonder is: why do we dismiss the dream as fiction? This question has laid the groundwork for my artmaking.

Because I do not have the training or the resources to conduct the kind of widespread scientific analysis which is taking place the world over, I am taking on the question more philosophically, personally, and artistically. If my ultimate goal is to understand reality through the understanding of the dream, first I must go through the process of understanding myself: basically, why I dream what I dream. It is in this beginning stage that my work is currently developing.

Brian Hitselberger, mixed-media

I am interested in coercing a disparate set of materials into a cohesive narrative to be read by an audience. My work is about stories I've lived, heard, dreamed or hope for. I'm not
interetesed in trying to hide my presence in my pieces--the hand of
the object maker in a sense validates the object. It's how I know
I'm here.

Justin Plakas, film and photography

I started making paintings after I graduated high school just out of curiosity. I had never really taken any art courses except for the ones we had to take in public school. My little brother, knowing that I always wanted to make films and couldn't afford a camera, bought me a video camera for 40 dollars from a guy off the street. And that is how I got started making videos. With a computer I could now essentially make paintings that move and with audio I could do things that I could never do with traditional painting methods.

I can join the audio with the visual elements and construct an environment that people have never seen before and that is what appeals to me about the whole process.

Emily L. Smith, poetry

Like most kids, I grew up thinking the town I lived in and the people I knew were unremarkable. It was only years later that I came to realize the rarity of the environment and ethic around me, the acres of farmland, waterways, and forests that disappeared a little with each of my visits home. Poetry might seem a small effort at saving the rhythms of rural speech and life, but itís the only means of elegy I know. Even when I am not writing specifically about the landscape of my childhood, about the lost and derelict, I write from them. They are the color and texture against which I understand the world.

Say there is still a flooded rice field in her. A wet mouth. Limbs hung with moss. Somewhere, her toothbrush brittle in a cabinet. The sky, a rust red barn. Whatís sad: even a shade tree can dissolve the moon. The road coughs up a spindly tree. A fish hooked and thrashing in her. A decoy catching on iced air. The kids we were pull their knees to their hearts. Because there are veins in our bodies jumbled as fishing line. Towns held together by a tractorís loose stitch. Who doesnít want years from now, life light and gauzy as cotton? A porch overlooking a fistful of bearded fields. We are always thinking with our hands. A drakeís head flopped over a thumb. An iridescent dress, light shifting on marsh grass. A season passing in and out of her chest. Eventually, we have to smooth out the waves from bed linen, turn off the unconvincing windmill of wings. Learn to let a retriever live up to his name, bound back to us, a duckís legs and wilted neck slung from his jaw. He waits still as Sunday afternoon in Filbert. So much unsaid in a mouth. Humid nights. Damp hands. The tang of wet wood in a blind. That first shot. A sweet that wonít dissolve on her tongue. The way the sky drops, sometimes. A tumbling mess of blue-wings.