The eight oil and acrylic paintings on view at Galleri Urbane are from Forrest Solis’s Self and Sex Series: What a young woman ought to know. Most are three or four feet in size, and each is divided into two sections. The first section (at left or on top) is an excerpt of text from the 1913 advice manual of the same title by Mrs. Mary Wood-Allen, M.D. National Superintendent of the Purity Department of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and is accompanied by a vintage black-and-white illustration. The second section (below or at right), is a color representation of Solis’s model in the present day, enacting some appropriate response to Dr. Wood-Allen’s maxims.
Insofar as each of the sections is carefully and accurately drawn, the paintings could be called realistic in style, but the gap between the presumed points of view of the Progressive-era advice giver, and those of the post-feminist artist and viewer, opens up a broad irony. Certainly few mainstream advice books today would promote the feminine ideal quite so reverently and whole-heartedly. The irony is perhaps especially broad in Chapter II: “Care Of The Body: You Are Something Like A Snail”(undated), in which Wood-Allen’s text advises, “Those who look at our bodily dwelling can gain a very good idea of what we are. The external appearance will indicate to a great extent our character. The care of our body, then, adds to our value.” Below that, Solis’s model, with bangs swept across her forehead and wearing hipster eyeglasses and a plaid dress, gives a wry half-smile as she holds up her right hand to examine her just-painted nails, as if enjoying the self-referentiality of it all.
And yet, in spite of the historical distance, the popularity of advice on the same basic topics of makeup, clothing, cooking and decorating seems undiminished today, as any glance at a supermarket magazine rack will confirm, even if now more often combined with explicit tips on career-building and sexual practices and premised on an ideal of autonomous female self-determination. Perhaps unexpectedly, the paintings leave somewhat open the question of what is timeless and what is culturally constructed. The series’s straight-faced humor recalls that of a text painting like John Baldessari’s Tips For Artists Who Want To Sell(1966-68), whose first bullet point specifies, “Generally speaking, paintings with light colors sell more quickly than paintings with dark colors,” but its biographical and open-ended subject matter leaves more room for viewers to think about putting themselves in the picture.
