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Debra Disman

Artist

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Elham Sagharchi

EXHIBITIONISTA: “(Re)imagining Home: On Care for Our Common Home”

August 26, 2022 By Debra Disman

18th Street Arts Center is pleased to present the exhibition (Re)imagining Home: On Care for Our Common Home, curated by Emma Balda and Venus Tung-yan Lau, on view in the Kitchen Lab at 18th Street Arts Center’s Airport Campus (3026 Airport Ave. in Santa Monica) from August 22, 2022 – July 31, 2023.

What is home? 

Over the last two years, our notions of home have been challenged, transformed, and clarified. The pandemic has simultaneously forced us to shrink our physical home, while also asking us to expand our sense of home to now include people, food, rituals, and ideas. We have also seen our relationship with and to the Earth change. We have seen that our sense of home must expand to include the Earth and the way we care for it.

As we attempt to create a shared home, the first step in that is defining what home means to us. This project asked the 18th Street community to examine the idea of home outside of the domestic sense. They were asked to identify people, memories, materials, places, movements, or concepts that resonate as home to them. These ideas, in combination with art that reflects on this concept, will then be displayed on the monitor in the Kitchen Lab at the Airport Campus. This project relied heavily on 18th Street’s theme “Our Shared Home,” while also deconstructing and defining what that sense of home means so that we can better understand what it means to share this space with one another. 

This exhibition highlights the artworks of Alexandra Dillon, Christopher Tin, Dan Kwong, Dan S Wang, David McDonald, Deborah Lynn Irmas, Debra Disman, Edi Dai, Elham Sagharchi, Gwen Samuels, Jeff Beale, Julia Michelle Dawson, Lionel Popkin, Luciana Abait, M Susan Broussard, Melinda Smith Altshuler, Michael Masucci, Po-Hao Chi, Rebecca Youssef, and Yvette Gellis, all artists in residence at 18th Street Arts Center.

Explore a 360 view of the virtual exhibition HERE.

Tagged With: !8th Street Arts Center, (Re)imagining Home: On Care for Our Common Home, 18th Street Arts Center’s Airport Campus, Alexandra Dillon, Christopher Tin, curated by Emma Balda and Venus Tung-yan Lau, Dan Kwong, Dan S. Wang, David McDonald, Deborah Lynn Irmas, Debra Disman, Edi Dai, Elham Sagharchi, Emma Balda, Exhibition, Gwen Samuels, Jeff Beale, Julia Michelle Dawson, Kitchen Lab at 18th Street Arts Center’s Airport Campus, Lionel Popkin, Luciana Abait, M Susan Broussard, Melinda Smith Altshuler, Michael Masucci, notions of home, Po-Hao Chi, Rebecca Youssef, Venus Tung-yan Lau, Yvette Gellis

“Building Networks of Empathy”

October 23, 2020 By Debra Disman

I am honored to participate in:

“Building Networks of Empathy”

at the Airport Gallery of 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, CA

October 26  – December 15, 2020 

The exhibition Building Networks of Empathy is the second of a two-part show that asks us to consider the ways in which art empowers not only the artist, but its viewers to transform their most difficult experiences into enlightened outcomes. The first part of the show is an ongoing online-only exhibition entitled Facing Darkness, which encouraged artists in our community to reflect internally on our current moment of pandemic, isolation, and structural inequity laid bare.

For this second part, which will be physically installed in 18th Street Arts Center’s spacious Airport campus hangar galleries, artists were asked to respond to how they have changed as a result of their inner reflections on darkness, and to imagine new futures and societal structures as we see our way out of crisis. Each artist grapples as well with the role that art can play in social reflection, expression, and cultural paradigm shifts as a result of a deeper understanding of each other, and the empathy that follows. The exhibition sees empathy not only as a way to share and understand what others are going through, but also as a natural and endless resource that we can all rely on when crisis and emergency hit, with hopes that we can turn this moment of collective fear into a sublime experience.

Debra Disman, Chromatic Interactions: The Golden Thread, 2020. File cards, pencils, crayons, thread. Installation. 76 x 90 inches. Photo by Debra Disman. Courtesy of the artist.
Debra Disman, Chromatic Interactions: The Golden Thread, 2020. File cards, pencils, crayons, thread. Installation. 76 x 90 inches.
Photo by Debra Disman. Courtesy of the artist.

“I was commissioned to create an interactive book for Craft Contemporary’s 2017 exhibition, Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California, which opened shortly after the 2016 presidential election. Visitors could choose file cards in an array of colors, draw and write on them, and insert them into the pocketed pages of the book. A range of feelings, responses, and concerns were expressed through the cards, which the Museum Staff saved and gave to me at the end of the show. I stitched them together grouped loosely by theme, to express the network of empathy they depicted, held together by golden thread.”

This exhibition may be viewed by appointment only. Please visit here to sign up to visit the exhibition!

Participating artists include: Alexandra Dillon, Deborah Lynn Irmas, Luigia Gio Martelloni, Rebecca Setareh, M Susan Broussard, Julia Michelle Dawson, Lionel Popkin, Ameeta Nanji, Siru Wen, Elham Sagharchi, Debra Disman, Luciana Abait, Sheila Karbassian, Daniela Schweitzer, Joan Wulf, Loren Harris-Heller, Nung-Hsin Hu, and Susie McKay Krieser.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a live Zoom panel featuring Alma Ruiz and Karen Sherman, moderated by Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, on November 12, 2020 at 12pm. For this panel discussion, curators, artists, activists, advocates, and scholars are invited to meet virtually  to reflect on the public opening of Facing Darkness, and consider how the show renders a public crisis and artists’ circumstances evident and knowable. Moderated by artist-scholar Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, with talks by curator Alma Ruiz and dancemaker Karen Sherman, (Inter)facing Darkness will frame a dialogue on how artists are operating as second responders, as thought leaders, and resource gatherers at this time. Participants will be invited to speak on their experience of the show at this moment. Register here.

Filed Under: ARTISTS, Exhibitions, New Work, Presentations, Work Tagged With: "Building Networks of Empathy", 18th Street Airport Gallery, 18th Street Arts Center, Alexandra Dillon, Alma Ruiz, Ameeta Nanji, and Susie McKay Krieser., Art and Empathy, Art in the time of Covid, Artists, Artists Respond, Artists Respond to Pandemic, Daniela Schweitzer, Deborah Lynn Irmas, Debra Disman, Elham Sagharchi, Frida Cano, Group Show, Joan Wulf, Julia Michelle Dawson, Karen Sherman, Lionel Popkin, Loren Harris-Heller, Luciana Abait, Luigia Gio Martelloni, M Susan Broussard, Nung-Hsin Hu, Online Exhibition, Paul Bonon-Rodriguez, Rebecca Setareh, Response to Pandemic, Sheila Karbassian, Siru Wen

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