Gregory Bae is a first-generation American artist born in 1986 in Salt Lake City. He spent his childhood moving back and forth between South Korea and the United States. He holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and he has lived in Los Angeles, Rome, and Brooklyn before moving to Spartanburg, SC.
 
Major activities Gregory undertook while in Spartanburg include working with the COLORS program, collaborating with Wofford College for a multi-cultural Carnivale event, planning and creating decor for the HUB-BUB Halloween party, and hosting figure drawing sessions. 


I pursue the paradox of discovering universally human themes in private sources; this stems from examining human transience. My current work explores collective identity and individualism amidst global connectivity and the quotidian aspects of our modern age.

I embrace a stubborn and old intimacy that is realized through painting; I work within the archetypes of still life, portraiture, and landscape while employing the practice of observational painting. By portraying specific subjects, evoking a personal narrative, incorporating present-day objects as cultural indicators, and involving contemporary technology, I attempt to refresh these archetypes.

The paintings themselves are often life-sized compositions that address a tradition of post-modern painting: as a window or an image and also as a physical object. I approach this duality by emphasizing the flatness of the surface and by indulging in the physicality of paint. I search for opportune moments to use the language of abstract mark making to contradict, yet enhance the integrity of pictorial space.
    
The painted objects echo the paintings as objects; they strive to relay uniqueness and authenticity while admitting their designated utility. Thus their values – poetic and practical – rely mostly on a sense of emotional attachment. 



Esteban completed his BFA at Southern Illinois University where he received a 2007 REACH Creativity Award, and became a McNair Scholar. He completed MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009, where he received a Presidential Scholarship and the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. Esteban has produced murals throughout various parts of the USA, such as Chicago, IL, San Antonio, TX, and Kansas City, MO. He has been in numerous publications and his mural work has been featured on HGTV. Esteban has also been a part of various exhibitions including the 2009 New Insight exhibition at Art Chicago, Geography of Imagination curated by Phong Bui in New York City, and the East/West 2009: Emerging Artist Exchange at the CoCA in Seattle. Since his arrival at HUB-BUB he has collaborated with Ballet Spartanburg, created works on paper, painted murals, and produced a short film. 


I am captivated not only by the stories of revolutionary movements, but the imagery, monumental actions, and the beautiful speeches they create. Beginning with the basic premise of a painting as a stage, I have begun investigating the theatricality of revolutionary struggles. Cornell West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public in the same way that Democracy is what justice is in practice.” West brings up the interesting point of the appearance and the visual legacy that concepts of freedom and equality leave behind. This leads me to question, how do images affect our understanding of revolutionary struggles, our political actions, and our notions of leadership?

My interest in the mythology of these conflicts and their translations into visual mediums is what leads me to my recent work. There is a certain level of theatricality embodied in history paintings that can be seen in everything from gesture to composition. As such, I have begun investigating the conceptual and aesthetic links between things like history painting, documentary photography, film noir, silent movies, and comic books, as well as how these mediums have been used to communicate political unrest and initiate political agendas. More specifically, I am interested in researching the visual legacy of leadership. I am intrigued by our social preoccupation with the concept of the leader/hero, seen in everything from film noir and comic books to presidential elections aspiring for “change”.

In questioning the nature of my physical relationship to these political upheavals, I have arrived at a point of critical self-reflection. In thinking about my role as an artist in the fight for justice and equality, I have begun incorporating the artist as actor within the context of my paintings. In the case of my recent film project, I have completely taken up the role of being both creator and character. Influenced by Augusto Boal’s book, Theatre of the Oppressed, I seek to explore painting not as a stage for the revolutionary action in and of itself, but rather a space for the rehearsal of revolutionary thoughts.

 

 

 

Claudia Dishon was incarnated as a human in Louisville, Kentucky in the summer of 1983. She is of non-descript American descent.  Her mystical belief system represents what happens when Catholicism meets science-fiction and nature paganism.  She achieved her BFA in Printmaking from Murray State University in Kentucky and her MFA in Printmaking from Clemson University.

Dishon’s year at HUB-BUB represents several completely new experiences in her artistic career.  She began working on a large scale and creating with fabric and thread.  Spartanburg was home to her first outdoor installation at the Cottonwood Trail, her first public performance in the Denny’s Plaza, and her first experience designing a public event with the Evening of Earthly Delights Halloween party.  
After her residency she will remain in Spartanburg to teach drawing at Converse College and continue to participate in the local energy.
 

My work airs resentments and sorrows with the goal of personal and artistic transformation.  My imagery is a means to make visceral statements with an intensity that I lack in any other mode of expression.  In my work, a break-up becomes a colorful epic battle.  Power struggles become tension-filled, abstract patterns.

I translate my struggles into mythic imagery as a way of communicating their emotional significance.  My imagery consists of personal symbols that represent a cross-over between pop culture and mysticism.  As sources of inspiration, I have drawn most recently upon Tibetan-Buddhist paintings and animation.  This work is also informed by my blossoming interest in natal astrology and Eastern religions.

I often address subjects that I find personally disturbing, such as death, deceit, and failed human interactions. In working with these subjects, I come to a consensus about their meanings and relevancies.  In this way, negative attributes like insecurity and failure become gateways to cosmic understanding.

I typically begin pieces through stream-of-consciousness drawing.  I form my pieces through intuition, and, as the imagery develops, I decipher the content of the piece and its meaning.  A piece for me begins as a freehanded skeletal frame that I slowly refine through a variety of mediums.  Most recently, I have been combining water color, colored pencil, fabric, and textured papers.
    
Because my artistic practice so often reflects a level of interaction between me and my surroundings, I am interested in the relationship between the viewer and my imagery.  My work and its viewing are both highly context dependent; each is the product of a specific emotional reaction, place, and time.  I invite the viewer to interpret my subjective perception.  The viewing of my work is part of the same interactive process in which I create.  For this reason, I don’t regard the meaning of my pieces as concrete or stagnant; instead, my work is a sensitive documentation of the ever-changing natural world.

 

 

Jameelah Lang’s mother is from Jeddah, Saudia Arabia, and her father is from Bridgeport, Connecticut.  She was raised in Lawrence, Kansas, although she has lived in and often visited the Middle East.  She received her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of Kansas in 2007, and she will receive her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Fiction) in May 2010, also from the University of Kansas. In Lawrence, Jameelah co-founded the Bathtub Kansas Collective, a writers‘ collective that serves to create an integral relationship between community and literature.  During her stay at HUB-BUB, Jameelah continued to work on a short-story collection that will also serve as her Masters thesis.  

Next year, Jameelah intends to pursue a PhD in Creative Writing, do more impressions of her mother, and continue work on her short-story collection.  She acknowledges that her life will not ever be the same after HUB-BUB, and often tries to bribe the staff into letting her remain the Writer-in-Residence for a few more years, sometimes with food and sometimes with mild threats.  Her efforts, so far, have failed.       


As a writer, I probe the physical and emotional spaces where geographies, cultures, and traditions intersect and become complicated.  In my critical study and creative work, I investigate and relay the impossibility of locating oneself within rigid cultural boundaries, and I try to communicate the feelings of existing within ambiguous, hybrid places.  Accordingly, my writing and critical study blend genres and themes from both sides of my cultural heritage as a Middle-Eastern American and examine the spaces where cultures bump up against one another, sometimes more forcefully than others.
 
I am working to find ways to locate cultural borderlands within modern settings or borders in order to emphasize their contemporary relevancies. American culture envisions the world as ever-more globalized or accessible, and it casts humans as unattached to any singular landscape.  My mother is an immigrant from Saudi Arabia, and her marriage to my father is the result of permeable global borders.  However, as I was growing up, my mother always stressed that there were certain aspects of “home” she simply could not find or recreate—in either country.

The search for a working “middle ground” that both acknowledges and challenges cultural boundaries is the driving force behind my creative writing and critical study.  I strive to answer questions such as, “How can a hybrid identity or sensibility be communicated in a way that is fair?” “Can multiple ways of telling and perceiving a story or experience be communicated through a single, inclusive lens?” “Where do the boundaries exist between seemingly disparate narrative forms (such as Eastern oral traditions and Western literary traditions)?” and “How are these boundaries complicated?”

My creative work merges the oral storytelling tradition with contemporary narrative concerns (such as language and form).  I try to balance the magical realist traditions of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Leslie Marmon Silko with the narrative concerns of realists like Raymond Carver and Diane Williams. I attempt to relay the impossibilities of assimilation or cultural adaptation by including elements of the folktale genre in realist-based works. By breaking genre constraints in my creative writing, I hope to rethink the relationship between teller and audience by actively involving 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, and the story of mixed cultures is increasingly more the story of American culture.