ASU Herberger College School of Art Faculty:
2006-2007 Exhibition

April 14 through September 9, 2007

FORREST SOLIS

Forrest Solis
Peep Show (dyptich), 2007
Oil on canvas
36 x 30 x 3 ½"
Courtesy of the artist

Forrest Solis

The human figure is my central preoccupation. My thematic source material is varied, incorporating elements of Sigmund Freud's notions of the uncanny, along with ideas drawn from Jacques Lacan, Carl Jung, Mikhail Bakhtin and the South American literature of magical and grotesque realism.

Mirroring the absurdity of contemporary logic, my paintings challenge the status quo of visual reality. Through the use of mirrors, I create images that are disorienting, visually confusing and that evoke a sense of being grounded in reality without being quite real.

By fragmenting the space and playing with traditional ideas about visual gravity, I create compositional instability, subverting the idea of a “fixed” image. I want to highlight and confront the effect of contemporary instability on our psyches. In fact, my goal, through combining spatial inversions where figures are simultaneously upside-down and right-side-up with flatly painted optical illusions, is to incite a physical response from the viewer.

These elements, together, create an intellectual uncertainty, which is representative of a psychological time and space, formed of fragmented childhood memories and adult desires where the past, present and future collide. Also, I am highly intrigued by the idea that mirrors can indeed distort our self-perceptions and by the transformative power of costume, which enable the release of powerful feelings otherwise contained within fixed social behaviors. 

Furthermore, there is a rich self-reflexive history behind female portraiture that I find fascinating. It has become important to me that I appear, in a "Hitchcockian" manner, within these paintings, allowing me to achieve a satisfying level of meta-fictive storytelling. 

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