BIO
Debra Disman is a Los Angeles-based artist known for her work inspired by the book, both as a solo practitioner and in the public sphere of community engagement. As a maker, teaching artist, researcher and writer she creates work and projects which investigate states of being and connectiveness through intensive engagement with materials, while attempting to fully explore and exploit their haptic properties.
Her work is widely shown in museums, galleries, universities, libraries and art centers including ArtShare LA; The Irvine Fine Arts Center; The New Bedford Art Museum; The Brand Library and Art Center and ReflectSpace Gallery in Glendale, CA; Craft Contemporary in LA, The Long Beach Museum of Art; The University of the Arts in Philadelphia; The Cape Cod Museum of Art; The Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA; The University of Puget Sound; and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery as well as through social practice and community endeavors.
Disman was the featured artist for the Big Read in LA in 2016 and is the recipient of an inaugural 2016-17 WORD: Artist Grant / Bruce Geller Memorial Prize to create “The Sheltering Book”, a life-sized book structure designed as a catalyst for community creativity. She has been commissioned by LA’s Craft Contemporary Museum to create an interactive book for the 2017 exhibition, “Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California" and by 18th Street Arts Center to create the artists’ book, “Unfolding Possibilities” in 2021 in collaboration with the community at-large. Her book, “CONCURRENCIES Charlotte Salomon and Eva Hesse: Genius, Trauma and the Creative Imagination” was published by ReflectSpace Gallery/Glendale Library Arts and Culture in 2023.
She was a 2018 Studio Resident at the Camera Obscura Art Lab at 1450 Ocean in Santa Monica and has served as an Artist-in-Residence with the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs since 2017. A Santa Monica Artist Fellow in 2021-22, she has been an artist-in-residence at 18th Street Arts Center since 2018.
STATEMENT
Springing initially from the form of the book, my work traverses textiles, sculpture, installation and performance to push the familiar into forms that arrest, baffle and bewilder, while simultaneously offering moments of rest, solace and contemplation. As the playwright Bertolt Brecht famously wanted to do, I seek to "make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange" as a way of changing our perception and illuminating a sudden experience of truth and recognition.
I employ the materiality of fiber to engage the senses and invite altered ways of experiencing the world and our place in it, both soothing and confounding the eye with uneven visual repetition. Through this means of stabilizing and destabilizing, I hope to instigate fundamental questions that encourage an examination of what we think we know and are. In my experience, we know more than we think we do, and what we think we know, we may not.
"We approach the work not as a book, which has always been an integral part of Disman’s work, but as a sculpture. One takes note of the focus and care these works require, and subsequently the labor appears as a part of the story." -- Juri Koll
Devoted to material labor and the inherent substance, sensibility and tactility of the handmade, I love nothing more than to be immersed in material manipulation, which inevitably yields some kind of distilled meaning. The evocative, visceral and profoundly physical quality of materials drives my work, permeating and charging it with emotional resonance. I am compelled to bundle, braid and bunch, tangle, twine, twist and tie, layer, loop, wrap, wind, stitch, sew, knot and glue, as well as paint, draw and write, intuitively developing, complicating and disrupting the surface to add levels of meaning. Often, the meaning becomes clear during or after this process rather than as a directive beforehand, as if it had been there all along, and simply surfaced during the act of making.
