Debra Disman

Artist

  •

"Hopes and Fears and..."

Exhibitionista: conVERGEnce at MarinMOCA

By

I am thrilled to be participating in MarinMOCA’s upcoming exhibition:

conVERGEnce!

“In a time of extraordinary flux, this exhibit will explore concepts of merging, verging and combining in shape, form, color, and meaning. How do artists investigate coming together—or coming apart—in their practice? The exhibit will feature artists from around the country working in a variety of media.

The exhibit has been juried by Susan Snyder who is a partner with Oliver Caldwell in the Caldwell Snyder Gallery, a leading contemporary art gallery representing many of the most significant international painters and sculptors of the 21st century. Founded in 1983, the gallery now has three locations in San Francisco, St. Helena, and Montecito.”

These are the participating artists.

I am showing, “Hopes and Fears and…” 2020, 24.5 x 16.25, mixed media (textile samples, linen thread)

 

 

Darkness and Empathy

By

A two part exhibition at 18th Street Arts Center  explores artists’ reactions to the pandemic and document their experience of it, while offering coping mechanisims and beacons of hope. I have been honored to participate.

FACING DARKNESS
July 27, 2020 – June 30, 2021
Online

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
– James Baldwin

“Art’s role in healing trauma, restoring a sense of self, and bringing together a community has led us to realize how artists are our second responders. Artmaking is a necessary part of life, and core to processing, expressing, reckoning, and healing. In a time of worldwide heartbreak, we are recognizing our interconnectedness to one another, and creation of art is one way we deepen our empathic networks. The selected works by these artists engage with worldwide feelings of darkness and loss, using art as a path to communal processing and healing.”

Collective – “The only way out is through”


“Hopes and Fears and…”, 2020. Textile samples and linen thread. 24.5” x 16.5”. Courtesy of the artist.

“Hopes and Fears and…” describes a state where the mind obsessively repeats what it fears, cloaked in the mantle of hope. Such a process is a way of dealing with darkness. Are not hope and fear intrinsically linked as two sides of the same coin? We fear, then we hope that the realization of our fears does not manifest. All the hopes and fears stitched into this work are born of the state of our world, planet, society, and culture, and are voiced by many across the globe. This piece gives voice to those voices as well as my own.

BUILDING NETWORKS OF EMAPTHY
October 26, 2020 – 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.

Visit the 360 tour of the exhibition, created by Dollhouse here

“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.

FACING DARKNESS in the time of pandemic

By

I am honored to participate in the exhibition: FACING DARKNESS in the company of fellow 18th Street Art Center makers: Deborah Lynn Irmas, Beth Davila Waldman, Elham Sagharchi, Gwen Samuels, Rachel Chu, Debra Disman, M Susan Broussard, Lionel Popkin, Leo Garcia, Alexandra Dillon, Gregg A Chadwick, Ameeta Nanji, Yrneh Gabon, Claudia Concha, Luciana Abait, Rebecca Youssef, Crystal Michaelson, Susie McKay Krieser, Melinda Smith Altshuler, David McDonald, Julia Michelle Dawson, Daniela Schweitzer, Luigia Gio Martelloni, Sheila Karbassian, and Joan Wulf.

ONLINE from July 27, 2020 to June 30, 2021

”In our darkest hours, it is natural and human to seek connection with others, to face the darkness together so that we can imagine a brighter path forward. In our current pandemic-time of crisis and isolation, this instinct can feel thwarted, and lead us to even darker places. Art is one of the ways that communities can find resilience in isolation, a method of aesthetic communication that empowers both the artist and the viewer to transform the most difficult and paradigm-breaking experiences into new visions for the future. Even as the arts and cultural infrastructure in the US is in deep crisis, the work of artists reflecting on this time and its socio-cultural reverberations is even more necessary for binding us together and rebuilding our world. As Californians for the Arts director Julie Baker quipped “A first responder comes in and saves a life. A second responder comes in and helps rebuild a life.”

Artists are second responders, and this exhibition of 25 varied artists from 18th Street’s artist community present multivalent ways that artworks that address the human capacity to overcome hardships on both global and personal scales. From meditations on memory, investigations into the warped passage of time, working through fraught familial relationships, and grappling with fear and longing in a time of public health crises and inequities laid bare, the artists in this show address our current moment both obliquely and directly, with humor, melancholy, and uncomfortable propositions. Creation during this time feels nothing like luxury; rather it is deeply necessary in navigating the darkness ahead.” 

Collective – “The only way out is through”

“Hopes and Fears and…”, 2020, 24.5 x 16.25, mixed media

18th Street will host related online events over the course of the exhibition.

Join Us HERE and now….