Debra Disman

Artist

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Gwen Samuels

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

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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.

Tricksters and Transformation…What could be better?

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There’s a cool new show in town, transforming not through trickery, but with an Open Heart, and wondrous “soft” materials.

“Textiles have the universally demonstrated capacity for holding meaning, establishing connections, and creating healing. As we emerge, on many levels, from the darkness into the light of awareness of isolation and injustice we have an opportunity and obligation to examine the status quo. This exhibition will allow the artist to step into the now and make work that opens doors within themselves, thereby acting as a portal to a collective resurgence into a renewed relationship with the world. This awakening inspires transformation.

There is a deep potential for the artist to act as trickster, agent of change, or boundary crosser. After the pandemic and the social upheaval of the past eighteen months, the artist has gained renewed agency for creating more enlightened definitions of meaning and new ways of seeing.

The pandemic can be a portal, serving as a provocation to transformation.”

I am honored to be showing “Torrent and Tangle: Keep Your House In Order”, in a new, open configuration!





This work begs the question: with all the torrent and inevitable tangle, how DO we “keep our house in order” or keep our house at all?
Also a play on “keeping house” a sort of 1950’s housewifery term to my mind, , which eerily reverbs with the growing rate of homelessness across LA Counbty, the US and the globe.

In the words of revered and beloved LA-based artist Kim Abeles:
“I followed the thread like a stream to find balance.
Textile Arts Los Angeles has presented a rich exhibit juried by Carol Shaw-Sutton at the Helms Bakery space in Culver City. “Tricksters & Transformation” is the show, an artist-in-residency with Carmen Mardonez, and a zoom presentation with Beverly Naidus who provided an inspiring history of some of her many audience-engaged artworks.
It was tempting to photograph every piece because the exhibition is divine with art that offers detail and a tactile emotion. Speaking with hands and care. The title comes in part because of the multiple ways that the artists transform the materials, including post-production remnants and those that would have gone overlooked except for the poetics of art.

And here is a link to the show details: https://textileartsla.org/tricksters-exhibit-1” 

Join us for the
ARTISTS’ RECEPTION: TRICKSTERS & TRANSFORMATION

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Helms Design Center
8745 Washington Blvd. Studio E
Culver City, CA 90232 United States + Google Map
Website:https://textileartsla.org/tricksters-exhibit-1

Exhibitionista: TRICKSTERS & TRANSFORMATION at the Helms Design Center

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I am thrilled to be participating in “Tricksters and Transformation”, organized by Textile Arts LA, on view at the Helms Design Center, Studio E!

“Textiles have the universally demonstrated capacity for holding meaning, establishing connections, and creating healing. As we emerge, on many levels, from the darkness into the light of awareness of isolation and injustice we have an opportunity and obligation to examine the status quo. This exhibition will allow the artist to step into the now and make work that opens doors within themselves, thereby acting as a portal to a collective resurgence into a renewed relationship with the world. This awakening inspires transformation.

There is a deep potential for the artist to act as trickster, agent of change, or boundary crosser. After the pandemic and the social upheaval of the past eighteen months, the artist has gained renewed agency for creating more enlightened definitions of meaning and new ways of seeing.

The pandemic can be a portal, serving as a provocation to transformation.”

I am showing “Torrent and Tangle: Keep Your House In Order”, in a new configuration!

Juror: Carol Shaw-Sutton

Carol Shaw-Sutton has been exhibiting her fiber sculpture in the U.S. and internationally since the 1970s with the California Design Exhibitions, the Young American Award exhibition at Museum of Art and Design in NYC, three Lausanne Biennales in Switzerland and the Kyoto Museum of Art, Japan.  Her work is included in numerous major museum collections including the Oakland Museum of Art, The DeYoung Museum, The Museum of Art and Design, among others, as well as corporate and private holdings worldwide.  She received three NEA Individual Artist Fellowships, the prestigious Young American Award from the American Craft Council, the United States/Japan and the United States/France Fellowships and many others from her city and university. Shaw-Sutton recently retired from the School of Art at CSULB where she headed their Fiber Program for more than thirty years and is now Professor Emeritus.

Artist -in-residence Carmen Mardonez will be at the gallery. Please email Carrie Burckle or Lesley Roberts if you would like to meet one of us at the gallery to walk-through. Thank you for supporting textile arts in Los Angeles!