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June 26th - July 24th, 2009

Each year, HUB-BUB invites three visual artists and one creative writer to “live free and create” in downtown Spartanburg for 11 months. Claudia Dishon, Gregory Bae, Esteban del Valle, and Jameelah Lang were chosen as the 2009-10 HUB-BUB Artists-in-Residence.  They moved to Spartanburg in early June, 2009 to spend time making art/writing, getting involved in community based art projects and helping out with HUB-BUB events. This exhibit represents the work that they applied to the program with.

Gregory Bae
I find satisfaction and therapy in staring at the physical reality that I am immediately involved in. I have been selecting personal, quotidian things as subjects. I have been painting my observations and interpretations of these subjects. An assumed negligibility and banality that this type of painting is often associated with interests me.

I am also drawn to a psychology that can produce something tangential. I am curious about different types of creation.


Claudia Dishon
In my work I create an imaginative realm as a means to structure chaos. This fictional realm is a place to manifest my perceptions of the world.  In alignment with my world view, the pieces feature relationships that perplex, amuse and interest the viewer.  Rather than proclaiming one statement, the work exhibits multi faceted sprays of information meant to explain a more rounded picture of reality. Mental clutter becomes visual clutter when realized in my prints. Recognizable objects, animals, foods, herbs, and written text are layered to form compositions that function abstractly at a distance.  A closer inspection reveals identifiable forms within the layers of color and shape, like fossils studded in sedimentary rock.

I utilize the mediums of printmaking, watercolor and drawing to compose images that both engage the viewer and provide a venue for personal expression. Photo silkscreen enables the transformation of a hand drawn image to repeatable graphic one, as well as physically equalizes visuals into one cohesive layer. By exposing information into a silkscreen matrix, I can set arbitrary doodle of an ice cream cone, a scribble of an intimate text message and drawings of my aquarium fish all within the same print matrix. When printed simultaneously in the same stretch of color, these images are rendered visually equal.  Haphazard imagery receives the same attention and support as more purposeful symbols. Water color and drawing materials are then used to emphasize or exaggerate moments in the prints.



Esteban del Valle
“I am a revolutionary, and you're gonna have to keep on sayin that.”

- Fred Hampton 1948-1969

Before I could repeat the claim, “I am a revolutionary,” I had to ask myself, “What is a revolution?” In developing my interest and love for the fight for justice, I initially believed change could only come if people raised their rifles. After revaluating violent revolutions, I realized that the pursuit of freedom does not give those seeking it the right to transform into the same people they wish to be freed from. Cornell West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public in the same way that Democracy is what justice is in practice.” West and other scholars exposed me to the use of theology and philosophy as a means of examining the state of democracy in the world. A similar approach has become the spring board for my own art practice

There is a revolutionary moment and a revolutionary “look”. I am drawn to the iconic imagery of these radical struggles as they appear in photography, film, and the genre of history painting. Revolutionary movements live on through various mediums, but something is inevitably lost when an image becomes iconic. Through the process of reductive charcoal drawing, I seek to reactive or reconstruct these seminal moments by rendering them as still images. From a covered black surface of paper or canvas, I begin to pull out the details of the scene by erasing. Using the soft and ephemeral quality of the material, I attempt to create a sense of ambiguity where the moments can both be historical and contemporary. The theatrical space implied by the rendering of dramatic settings, or by the sheer scale of a monumental drawing, allows the viewer to become a witness and possibly an actor in an imagined revolutionary scene. Influenced by Augusto Boal’s book, “Theatre of the Oppressed,” I have begun to see painting not as the stage for the revolutionary action in and of itself, but rather a space for the rehearsal of revolutionary thoughts.


Jameelah Lang
As a writer, I probe the physical and emotional spaces where geographies, cultures, and traditions intersect and become complicated.  I investigate and relay the impossibility of locating oneself within rigid cultural boundaries and the feelings of existing within ambiguous, hybrid places.  Accordingly, my work blends genres and themes from both sides of my cultural heritage as a Middle-Eastern American and examines spaces where cultures bump up against one another, sometimes more forcefully than others.  To this end, my fiction blends the oral storytelling tradition with contemporary narrative concerns (such as language and form), and I try to balance the magical realist tradition of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende with the techniques of realists like Raymond Carver and Diane Williams.  

I am currently working on a collection of interrelated stories based on my experiences growing up in a bicultural family.  The stories relay the impossibilities of assimilation or cultural adaptation by including elements of the folktale genre in realist works—things like forceful characters, exaggeration, and cyclic conceptions of time. By breaking genre constraints in my collection, I hope to rethink the relationship between teller and audience and actively involve the reader in a reconsideration of the boundaries of language, form, and culture.  This is central to my work, because I believe that stories about mixed cultures require a hybrid narrative lens.  My stories ultimately center around the feelings of loss, both culturally and personally, that result from assimilation.


Opening Reception photos

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