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BoundUnbound: Inheritance, Faith, and the Fractured Self

📆  August 2, 2025 📍 Main Gallery, First Floor 💰 Free open to ages: All

Main Gallery Exhibition
August 2nd - September 20th, 2025

Gallery Hours after Opening
Wednesdays-Fridays 9am - 5pm
Saturdays 11am - 3pm

BoundUnbound: Inheritance, Faith, and the Fractured Self is the collaborative showing of fine artists Bella Bishara and Alexander Rouse through mutual meditation on the meaning of inherited pain, and the conflict between surviving that pain while maintaining the roots of identity.

These artists diverge in material and background–Bishara’s work comprises luminous, textile-accented paintings borne of Coptic ritual and personal myth; Rouse’s naturalist, mixed-media works are steeped in the haunted soil of the American South–but both artists converge around a single question: What are we to do with the histories we carry? Bishara’s work ruminates on the Church as both body and threshold: a space of belonging and estrangement, a spirit of sanctity laced with guilt. Through the use of bold color, sacred forms, and the intimacy of fiber, she unravels the line between reverence and resistance. Rouse, in turn, conjures an American South that hungers and persists—its teeth wet with blood, memory, and myth. Through elegiac text and visceral materiality, his work mourns what has been taken or destroyed, while naming the systems that demand such sacrifice.

Together, their practices map a terrain of spiritual rupture and cultural inheritance. BoundUnbound does not seek closure, but instead carves out space for grief, transformation, and a reclamation of selfhood that honors the beautiful complexity of survival.

Greenville Center for Creative Arts affirms the importance of artistic freedom and the power of creative expression — including work that may provoke, challenge, or confront. This exhibition contains content that some viewers may find unsettling or emotionally intense, including references to religion. Viewer discretion is advised for all ages.

Artist Information

Alexander Rouse

Biography
Alexander Rouse is an artist, designer, and writer from South Carolina. His work was influenced from an early age by the natural world, religious iconography, and a deep curiosity for any art around him. After receiving a degree in graphic design, Alexander has pivoted to a more studio-focused practice, working on building stability as a fine artist and expanding his work to new dimensions. As a designer, he has received awards from the American Advertising Federation, and as an artist Alexander has exhibited in a number of galleries, received publication, and created client work across multiple applications.

Artist Statement
Alexander bears a hereditary link to Southern culture and natural identity. His art is shaped by this history and the complex systems and personalities that come with it. In tandem with the agrarian lives of his ancestors, Alexander’s art takes a naturalistic focus, centering subjects of the natural world and objectifying those subjects in a narrative context. His work invites questions of selfhood, inheritance, and metanarrative, and cornerstone of his practice is a deep rooting in classical references, religious aesthetics, and semiotic materialism. His focus is water-based painting, with strong emphasis on illustration and draftsmanship. Additional mediums include cyanotype, assemblage, and pyrography. He takes special interest in combining familiar methodology with unusual materials—wood-burning into bone, cyanotype on wood, paintings as assemblage.

Artist Information

Bella Bishara

Biography
Bella Bishara is a Greenville-based fine artist and illustrator. She graduated from the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Visual Arts. She has had art education throughout all of school and also took classes at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Though raised in Greenville, she is originally from Egypt.

Bella’s work focuses on themes of identity, change, and various experiences in her life. Some of these topics include spirituality, mental health, and how she interprets herself and the world around her. Bella enjoys using vibrant color palettes as a way to separate her work from reality and incorporates mixed media elements, such as crochet and other mediums into her work. She uses symbols like tree branches and veins in her work as a reminder of how we are constantly changing and growing, especially through creating and expressing.

Artist Statement
veil & vessel is an examination of the deeply personal intersection of faith, identity, and mental health. Drawing on her experience as a Coptic Orthodox Christian and first-generation Egyptian American, Bella Bishara explores what it means to navigate a spiritual tradition that has shaped her, even as she questions and resists aspects of it.

The Coptic Church is often described as a “body”—a symbol of unity, belief, and collective identity. But what happens when one feels alienated from that body? Bishara’s work confronts this dissonance, giving form to the emotional and psychological weight of living in tension with a faith that both anchors and unsettles her. Through this body of work, she reckons with feelings of guilt, fear, shame, and longing, asking: Can a new kind of spiritual home be created? Can one rebuild a sense of belonging without losing themselves?

veil & vessel reflects this inner conflict through bold, expressive compositions and mixed media processes. Bishara incorporates elements such as crochet and yarn into her work, blending painting with a historical fiber art that mirrors the contemporary exploration of a centuries old subject. Her practice moves fluidly between the personal and the symbolic, channeling themes of isolation, transformation, and resilience.

At its core, this series is a meditation on spiritual autonomy and emotional truth. It confronts the weight of inherited expectations and offers space for compassion, vulnerability, and self-definition. Rather than rejecting her faith outright, Bishara seeks to reimagine it—one shaped not by fear or conformity, but by love, integrity, and a deep sense of humanity.

veil & vessel stands as both an inquiry and an offering: a testament to the courage it takes to question, to grieve, and to begin again.