Glendale Library, Arts & Culture and ReflectSpace Gallery present “I Can’t I Won’t I Will I Do,” a solo exhibition featuring Los Angeles-based artist Debra Disman. Disman’s work is inspired by books, which traverses tapestry, installation and sculpture to push familiar forms and materials into art that bewilder. The exhibition will include new works created in response to Disman’s investigation of artists Charlotte Salomon and Eva Hesse and how they employed the creative process to transform traumatic pasts into the creation of new art forms. Disman’s tactile works create space for reflection, connection and solace. 

“I Can’t I Won’t I Will I Do” will be on view at Central Library during regular operating hours through March 19.

Disman will also conduct workshops at Central Library at the Be the Change Book Festival on Saturday, Feb. 25 from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. and work with the local community to create handmade books designed to engage the hands, heart, mind and soul. 

Accompanying the exhibition, ReflectSpace will publish an artist book by Disman titled “Concurrencies: Charlotte Salomon and Eva Hesse: Genius, Trauma and Creative Imagination.” The artist book has grown out of Disman’s research and is an intuitive and fleeting reflection on the lives, works and imaginations of Salomon and Hesse. 

Debra Disman is a Los Angeles-based artist known for her work inspired by books, both as a solo practitioner and in the public sphere of community engagement. As a maker and teaching artist, she creates work and projects that push the book’s body and boundaries into new media and materials, inviting altered ways of viewing the world and how it is inhabited. 

Her work is shown in multiple museums, galleries, universities and libraries. Disman is the recipient of a 2016-17 WORD: Artist Grant/Bruce Geller Memorial Prize and was a studio resident at the Camera Obscura Art Lab in Santa Monica in 2018. Disman is a local artist-in-residence at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica and a 2021-22 Santa Monica Artist Fellow.