Debra Disman

Artist

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New Work

“Offal” is not so Awful

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I am thrilled to be included in the current exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, OFFAL

https://www.lamag.org/portfolio_page/offal/

Thank you Steven Wong, Curator, for putting this together.

Thank you Brianna Bakke, Assistant Curator, for your writing.

And, thank you to the whole curatorial and installation staff and any volunteers, for creating such a beautiful, immersive display of all the works.  “Throes of the Body” has never been lit like this before, and it made all the difference.

The detail of the piece could really be seen,

and made accessible to the viewers.

Gratitudes!

Sharing Shows 5: “THE ARTFUL BOOK”

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I am excited and honored to be included in a number of current and upcoming shows across the US, and will be sharing about them in blog form, as well as in the EVENTS section of my website, as a way of further describing and chronicling my practice, honoring colleagues, and sharing gratitude for these opportunities and the people, organizations and institutions that make them happen. Shout out to ElonSchoenholz, Photographer extraordinaire who took the photographs below of “Profusion“, which will be shown in:

“The Artful Book”
California Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers Member Exhibit
Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA

The Artful Book
October 4, 2019 – January 5, 2020
“Today, artists who work in the Book Arts create fine and design bindings, fine press and letterpress editions, calligraphy, broadsides, handmade paper, and artist books. Visitors to The Artful Book will see outstanding contemporary examples of the Book Arts created by members of the California Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers. From finely crafted and superbly designed limited edition books to one-of-a-kind sculptural art objects, these artists let their imaginations soar and put their skills in the service of one of man’s best creations, the book. The Artful Book exhibition and related programming are made possible by lead support from The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation with additional generous support from the Bess J. Hodges Foundation.”

I will be showing three pieces:

Profusion
2018
8.75″ x 24.5″ x 7.75″
Bookboard, canvas, hemp cord, mulberry paper

In The Thicket of It 
2018
18″ x 30″ x 23″
Book board, canvas, acrylic paint, hemp cord, mulberry paper, wood

Falling
2019
11″ x 23″ x 7.5″
Bookboard, canvas,  hemp cord, mulberry paper

The Long Beach Museum of Art is a wondrous place by the sea..with a beautiful garden featuring a water sculpture by Claire Falkenstein Structure and Flow.

See you there!

Sharing Shows 4: “THE BOOK AS ART: WONDERS”

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I am excited and honored to be included in a number of current and upcoming shows across the US, and will be sharing about them in blog form, as well as in the EVENTS  section of my website, as a way of further describing and chronicling my practice, honoring colleagues, and sharing gratitude for these opportunities and the people, organizations and institutions that make them happen. Shout out to Elon Schoenholz, Photographer extraordinaire who took the photographs below of “The Fall“, which will be shown in:

The Book as Art v. 7.0: Wonders
Presented by the Decatur Arts Alliance
Decatur, Georgia

August 9–September 27, 2019

The Decatur Arts Alliance (DAA) presents the seventh edition of the juried exhibition of artists’ books, The Book as Art, August 9–September 27, 2019. This edition will be installed once again at the Decatur Branch of the DeKalb County Public Library.  The show’s dates encompass the AJC-Decatur Book Festival, which takes place each Labor Day weekend throughout the City of Decatur. The DAA will sponsor a festive opening on Friday, August 23, 2019.

“A book begins as a small mass of material, formed and pressed into life by ideas, words, and machines. A concept becomes thought, becomes word, becomes book, becomes sculpture. From the tactile complexity of handmade paper, to the alteration of existing volumes, to a variety of other materials and concepts, these objects, in an increasingly digital world, stubbornly survive. The objects in this exhibition will interpret the concept of the book and invite the viewer to look beyond the printed page to where word has become form.”

The Book as Art v. 7.0: Wonders’ location at the Decatur Branch of the DeKalb County Public Library is just off the Decatur Square, ideally accessible to the more than 85,000 attendees at the Festival as well as to visitors throughout the run of the show.

The Jurors:

Denise Bookwalter works in a range of print media including traditional and digital processes, artist’s books, installations and dimensional prints. Her artist’s books utilize old and new print technologies to create collaborative works. Her work has been exhibited and collected in a variety of venues across the country and abroad. She received her BA from Northwestern University and her MFA from Indiana University in Printmaking. Bookwalter currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her husband and twin girls. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Florida State University where she teaches printmaking and is Area Head of the Printmaking Department. She is the director and founder of Florida State University’s artists’ book press, Small Craft Advisory Press.

Mari Eckstein Gower is an artist and writer with a studio practice in Redmond, Washington, where she currently focuses on creating one of a kind and editioned artist books. She grew up in Southern California and studied art and humanities at Scripps College and Claremont Graduate University. Later she continued her studies of printmaking techniques at ateliers in Montreal and then writing with Al Young, Bruce Coville, Jane Yolen, and Ursula K. Leguin. Gower’s artist books are included in collections across the United States and Canada. Her work has been exhibited in gallery and museum shows in the United States and Europe.

Andrew Huot is a book artist and bookbinder in Atlanta, Georgia. He operates Big River Bindery, a studio for bookmaking and letterpress printing, book repair, and design. He has a Masters in Book Arts from the University of the Arts, teaches bookbinding and preservation for the University of Illinois, and workshops in his bindery and across the country. He exhibits his work widely and it is held in more than 50 university library collections. His artwork takes his everyday life and uses the patterns, lines, and shapes to create work that is playful and strikes a familiar cord with viewers.

The Book as Art v. 7.0: Wonders’  location at the Decatur Branch of the DeKalb County Public Library is just off the Decatur Square, ideally accessible to the more than 85,000 attendees at the Festival as well as to visitors throughout the run of the show.

“The Fall“, 2019
7″ x 24.5″ x 10.5″
Book board, hemp cord, mulberry paper, paperboard, canvas

The Book As Art…The Book Is Art.

Sharing Shows 1: “OFFAL”

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I am excited and honored to be included in a number of current and upcoming shows across the US, and will be sharing about them in blog form, as well as in the EVENTS  section of my website, as a way of further describing and chronicling my practice, honoring colleagues, and sharing gratitude for these opportunities and the people, organizations and institutions that make them happen. Shout out to Steven Wong, astrobuddha and Curator at the LAMAG/the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and Elon Schoenholz, Photographer extraordinaire.

First up is not too awful, just a little bit

“OFFAL”

August 15 – September 29
Opening reception: Sunday, August 11, 2 – 5 PM

The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery presents Offal, a group exhibition conceived from the subject of offal (ˈôfəl,ˈäfəl) or the culture of consuming innards.

WOW.

“Of all cultural taboos, those related to food are the most difficult to dispel. Food represents deeply rooted sets of ideas and beliefs — particularly with respect to self-identity and community. Offal is no different. In some cultures, offal is stigmatized for its socioeconomic and racial implications, while others treat and eat offal as an everyday means of survival or a delicacy. In keeping with this anatomy of offal, the exhibition seeks to expand the traditional parameters of cultural identity: raw, refigured and, in some cases, delightfully grotesque.” —OFFAL

I will be showing “Throes of the Body“,  sculptural Artists’ Book, 13 x 27 x 10.25”, mixed media, 2018

Side view, open/outside-inside

Front view, open/inside

Back view, open/outside
Photos: Elon Schoenholz  (Beautiful work…)

“The exhibition features a variety of work from forty-three Los Angeles-based contemporary artists who use traditional and unconventional techniques and media in their approach to the five overlapping themes that feed into the exhibition: labor, discard and waste, transcultural idioms, cultural retention and shame, and the abject. Notable works include Jim Shaw’s Dream Object (Digestive tract sculpture), a mixed media sculpture exploring their “inner” unconscious psyche; Victoria Reynolds’s oil paintings and charcoal drawings that give life to disemboweled organs while simultaneously serving as a memento mori of unfamiliar culinary cuts/organs only found in specialty “ethnic” markets; Danial Nord’s Sleeper, a video-driven sculptural fountain in the form of a translucent sculpture molded from his own body that examines the individual and societal consumption and digestion of today’s political rhetoric – on exhibit for the first time in Los Angeles; and a video collaboration between Gazelle Samizay and Labkhand Olfatmanesh that explores émigrés food traditions that can often outlive language through sanctifying ceremonies and family bonds.

At its heart, the exhibition seeks to unpack and celebrate the city of Los Angeles’ relationship to diversity and food in all of its forms — ultimately speaking to the offal in all of us.

Artists participating in Offal were selected from an open call for entries by a jury comprised of Ron Finley, proponent of urban gardening and South LA community leader; Julio César Morales, artist, educator, and curator; and Genevieve Erin O’Brien, artist, culinary adventurer and community organizer.

The selected artists include Panteha Abareshi, Edmund Arevalo, Phoebe Barnum, Andrea Bogdan, Johanna Breiding, SoYun Cho, Heisue Chung-Matheu, Ciriza, Debra Disman, Alexandre Dorriz, gloria galvez, Natalia Garcia Clark, Matt Hollis, Sara Hunsucker, Grace Hwang, Sarah Julig, Shannon Keller, Sydney Mills, Leo Mondor, Flavia Monteiro, Albert Natian, Alex Nazari, Jim Newberry, Dakota Noot, Avital Oehler, Labkhand Olfatmanesh, Abel Olivieri, Elisa Ortega Montilla, Carolie Parker, Antonia Price, Colin Roberts, Larisa Safaryan, Gazelle Samizay, Stephanie Sherwood, Emilia Ukkonen and Reed van Brunschot.

In addition, a selection of artists were invited to participate in the exhibition, including Bonnie Huang, Robert Karimi, Mark Mulroney, Danial Nord, Victoria Reynolds, Jim Shaw, Jeannine Shinoda and Jeffrey Vallance.” — OFFAL

It will be just “offally” fascinating, to see what everyone has done…can’t wait for this one!

Is not our work really, truly finished until it has been seen?

Working It: Processing the Untitled

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Documenting a bit of process, and hopefully progress.
Much harder than posting about teaching artistry, and the work of my wondrous students..

I will try my hand at it, and hopefully find my way, a way.

Time, as usual, is an issue.
Focused meditative time, is needed, and after home and studio, there just isn’t much to spare.

But, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Pushing into new materials….layering on gossamer cheesecloth onto a structure, because of its weave of threads, needed to coat the whole surface with acid-free PVA/glue,  and place the cheesecloth on it, cut around it and trim the excess when surface dried…surprisingly quickly, with the sun and a light breeze coming in through the window.

The light-filled space at 18th Street is perfect for this work, this effort, these discoveries, this journey.


Multiple surfaces, the nature of many book structures comprised of covers, spine and pages compels working one surface at a time, letting it dry and then moving to the next one.


Cheesecloth layered over raw canvas, layered over book board. The cheesecloth is unruly stuff…more like threads kept in place loosely, by the cross weave.


The two pieces of board, AKA, covers, are hinged together with long strands of jute cord, raw jute, so raw it has a fragrance. Strand are threaded through corresponding holes made with the awl in both covers, which move by sliding left and right over the cords. Simple, yet amazingly effective.

The juxtaposition of the materials in layering, adjacency and flow, as regard to interlocking color, differentiated textures and various states of unravel, fascinates me….how does the light get in and travel through, or not, how does the dimensionality affect how we see and respond to the work, sensorily, emotionally, viscerally, how do the materials work together in some kind of harmony, yet buttress up against each other with force at the same time?

Need to push on, need to keep exploring, finding more questions with just the tiniest intimation of any answer in them.

Think I will keep on going.

 

2019 LA Open Exhibition (2)

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I  was honored to participate in the 2019 LA OPEN at  TAG GALLERY  December 2018- January 2019

The show ran Tuesday, December 18 – Saturday, January 18

Press Release | Installation Images | Inventory | Map

Thank you to curator James Panozzo  for including my piece, “Burning Bush”, and with Gallery Director Rakeem Cunningham, putting together a fascination show I was proud to be a part of.


“Burning Bush”


A sense of scale…


Texture

TAG is a wonderful Gallery in the Miracle Mile District of Los Angeles.  Cooperatively and artist run, the Gallery presents multifaceted shows in all mediums throughout its upstairs and street level spaces.

Gallery Location: 5458 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 5 pm
Telephone: 310.829.9556
Email: info@taggallery.net

Check it out!