Many thanks to Uzomah Ugwu for this artist spotlight in her wondrous magazine Arte Realizzata and also for our FRUITFUL CONVERSATION.
Artist Spotlight on Debra Disman
Debra Disman is a Los Angeles-based artist known for her work inspired by the book, which traverses tapestry, installation, and sculpture to push familiar forms into works that arrest and baffle while simultaneously offering places of contemplation and solace. As a maker and teaching artist, she invites altered ways of viewing the world and how we inhabit it.
Disman was the featured artist for the Big Read in LA in 2016; is the recipient of a 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; and was commissioned by LA’s Craft Contemporary Museum to create an interactive book for their 2017 exhibition, “Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California.”
She was a 2018 Studio Resident at the Camera Obscura Art Lab in Santa Monica and has served as an Artist-in-Residence for the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs since 2017. A Santa Monica Artist Fellow in 2021-22, she continues projects, research, and teaching efforts across Los Angeles County and the world, contributing to 18th Street Arts Center as a local artist-in-residence.
Disman’s recent Santa Monica Artist Fellowship project, “Charlotte Salomon and Eva Hesse: Genius, Trauma and the Invention of New Forms of Visual Art in Response to the Holocaust,” shown at 18th Street Arts Center in June 2022, in the form of an open studio explored the concurrencies between the two artists and her response to them. Involving three essential components: Research, Artistic Production, and Public Engagement/Exhibition, the year-long project investigated, compared, and linked the lives and the groundbreaking work of Jewish women artists Charlotte Salomon and Eva Hesse based on their shared experience of trauma and loss; and their invention of new artistic forms through which Disman feels they respond to and attempt to cope with these traumas. Themes of the project include the relationship between internal and external turbulence and the creative act; the transformative power of the creative process: the triumph of the imagination as opposed to the triumph of the will; and how trauma can elicit the creation of new forms, voices, and materials that outlast their makers and continue to reverberate throughout the time, inspiring posterity.
“I Can’t I Won’t I Will I Do” encapsulates the resistance we may have to our destiny and our calling and the indomitable spirit that keeps all artists exploring, investigating, experimenting, and achieving.
“I Can’t I Won’t I Will I Do”, 2022, 13 x 71.5″, cotton table runner, linen thread
“Excavation of the Interior”, (detail), 2021, 12 x 28 x 12.5″, wood, mulberry and watercolor papers, canvas, muslin, linen thread, hemp cord
“Concurrencies I: Charlotte Salomon Eva Hesse”, 2022, 58 x 19.5″, denim, hemp cord, linen thread, metallic thread
“Finally And Just For A Minute”, 2022, 46 x 58.5”, canvas, burlap, hemp cord, acrylic paint, ribbon
