Raisa Solis

Statement

Raisa Solis (she/her) is a Filipino-American multidisciplinary artist who works in mixed media, film photography, sculpture, installation and floral design from San Francisco, California, United States. Her work explores her personal dynamic between immigration, home, trauma, mental illness and femininity. She received her BA in Studio Art from San Francisco State University in 2020. Her practice serves as a way to break traditional Filipinx cultural norms and decolonize the values she was raised with. In turn, creating visibility and encouraging others within her community to create work and share experiences not only as Filipinx-Americans but also as Asian Americans. Her practice also reviews traumatic experiences as an Asian American woman through her own gaze and the male gaze.

GlogauAIR Project

Raisa has a few projects planned. She will be creating a series of resin-cement sculptures for my project Heaven nor Hell and she plans on experimenting and creating sculptures of actual sized rice bags which would be presented on the floor, in rows, mimicking a graveyard as well as the “the line to get into heaven.”

This imagery does simply not come from imagination. When she was a child my father told her, “for every grain of rice you do not finish, that is a pound of rice you must carry in purgatory.” This was a common saying amongst Filipinx people.

Raisa will also present a video projection, Kain Na (Kain means rice in Tagalog, the phrase “Kain Na” also translates to “Let’s Eat”), which will contain scenes of washing rice and preparing it for cooking, displaying also how cooking is a labor of love in in Filipinx culture. Conversely, the washing process displays imagery of cleansing the rice be more palatable and better for consumption, like what Spanish colonizers did to the Filipinx people to meet their agenda.

CV Summary

Education

• 2020 BA – Studio Art, San Francisco State University

Exhibitions

• 2021 La Mariposa Nocturna (group exhibition), Good Mother Gallery, Oakland, CA
• 2021 Skate Like A Girl Benefit (group exhibition), Fieldwork Brewery, Berkeley, CA
• 2020 Alternative Process: San Francisco State University School of Art (group exhibition), SFO Museum, San Francisco, CA
• 2020 Slice x Macabre (two-person exhibition), SFSU Martin Wong Gallery, San Francisco, CA
• 2019 Green and Seen (group exhibition), SFSU Cesar Chavez Art Gallery, San Francisco, CA
• 2019 Friday’s News (group exhibition), SFSU Martin Wong Gallery, San Francisco, CA
• 2017 A Free Haven (group exhibition), Massive, Oakland, CA

Internships

• 2021 ROSe (Reclaiming Our Space), Soma Community Action Network (SOMCAN), San Francisco, CA

Art Handling/Installation

• Lands End, FOR-SITE Foundation, 1090 Point Lobos Ave, San Francisco, CA, November 7, 2021 – March 22, 2022

Zines

• fermenting, self-published, 2019

Gallery