Java.May.2016

FORREST SOLIS
Creative Push Project
By Jenna Duncan
Arizona State University art professor Forrest
Solis has taken a giant leap into honest,
personal experience with a large, multilayered
project revolving around women’s stories of
birth and motherhood.
Solis was the recipient of the Arizona Commission for
the Arts’ 2015 Artist Research & Development Grant.
Last spring, she launched Creative Push, a dialogue
between storytelling and visual art revolving around
childbirth. The project focuses on stories of women
and their labor and delivery (L+D).
So far Solis has collected interviews with 50 women.
With some help she’s audio-recorded women in a
very personal, almost confessional style, telling their
own stories of pregnancy, labor and birth. Solis says
she is embracing “the opportunity to talk to women
about their individual births and not just categorizing
them, such as C-section, home birth, [etc.].” She
instead seeks themes such as faith in birth, trauma
and other heavy themes not necessarily explored by
the medical community.
Some of Solis’s paintings, especially the ones using
dolls, force questions of women’s bodies becoming
objectified during childbirth. One painting depicts a
woman-sized doll spread out on the delivery table,
her parts threaded together like a marionette, having
her vagina stitched by a real-life doctor. In another
image, a clearly fake doll baby has emerged from a
new mother and is attached by a real umbilical cord.
When Solis discovered the second-floor surgical wing
of what used to be a Children’s Hospital at 200 E.
Curry Road in Tempe (a property that ASU acquired a
few years ago and mainly uses for the ASU Transfer
Center), she knew it was perfect for a multimedia
installation project connected to Creative Push. The
walls were bare and tiled, and the place has its own
ambiance, including a strange stillness that almost
sounds like a hum. Oh, yes—and it’s chock-full of old,
creepy hospital equipment, including examination
tables, vintage wheelchairs, life-size medical
dummies, a locker room for medics and those bright
overhead lights that are the first and last thing you
see when you go under for surgery.
The backbone of the immersive exhibition, titled
“Creative Push: L+D (Labor and Delivery),” set in
the decommissioned hospital, is a series of seven
paintings. Often using herself as the model, Solis
shows hospital scenes—some familiar and some
uncanny. For example, in a room close to the
ward’s entrance is the image of a woman seated
on a delivery table somehow self-administering an
epidural. In the hallway, a hospital-gown-clad Solis
stands with blood streaming from her legs—an
image that may disturb the faint of heart. But that’s
part of the mysticism and illusion of delivery. No one
ever seems to want to talk openly about the hardest,
most gruesome parts. And certainly not in public.
“Throughout antiquity, there’s lots of imagery, art and
talk about birth,” Solis says. “But then Christianity
came and there was this idealization of mother and
child, Immaculate Conception—all post birth. There
are none of the messy or visceral qualities about
it.” It wasn’t until the late 1960s or early 1970s that
the art world began to look again at women’s actual
experiences and truth in childbirth and motherhood.
Creative Push will pursue a National Endowment
for the Arts grant of $100,000 to take the project on
the road. Solis envisions something like Storycorps:
a traveling storytelling booth or team that collects
women’s birth stories from around the nation.
For more information or to learn of upcoming outreach
projects and Creative Push exhibits, visit www.facebook.com/
creativepush.org.
Photos courtesy Forrest Solis
JAVA 19
MAGAZINE