Maximum Security (exterior)
Debra Disman (Los Angeles, CA)
Artists' Book/Sculpture, 18” W x 15” H X 10.25” D
Artwork:
"Maximum Security" is a freestanding sculptural artists’ book, presented upright on a surface parallel to the floor in variable degrees of open to closed, spanning 18" wide when fully opened. The work speaks to the themes of imprisonment, the maximum security prison, and the prison industrial complex; a huge issue across the United States and abroad.
Fashioned in the format of the Western codex, with pages that can be seen as walls, covers as barricades and repeated windows barred with falling strings and no doors, Maximum Security compels the viewer to consider the ramifications of incarceration and effects of life within in the prison system. The black color, elegant and mysterious in some works, adds heaviness and a sense of physical and psychological burden compounded by areas of greater darkness in the nooks and crannies created by the pages. The horizonal stitching juxtaposed with the torrent of "free" strings" amplifies the sense of being trapped, as are many across the globe.
Artist Statement:
Springing initially from the form of the book, my work traverses textiles, sculpture, installation and performance. I employ the materiality of fiber to engage the senses and invite altered ways of experiencing the world and our place in it, both soothing and confounding the eye with uneven visual repetition. Through this means of stabilizing and destabilizing, I hope to instigate fundamental questions about what we think we know and are.
Devoted to the substance, sensibility and tactility of the handmade, I love nothing more than to be immersed in material manipulation, compelled to bundle, braid and bunch, tangle, twine, twist and tie, layer, loop, wrap, wind, stitch, knot and glue, as well as paint, draw and write, intuitively developing, complicating and disrupting the surface to add levels of meaning.
Often, this meaning becomes clear during or after this process rather than as a directive beforehand, as if it had been there all along and simply surfaced during the act of making
From the We're Doing It ALL Wrong® - 4th Annual Art Exhibition