Landscapes and large bodies featured in the Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona illuminate the artist’s explorations of gender, race, identity, and community.
Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature
December 16, 2023–November 27, 2024
Phoenix Art Museum
What can photographs of large female bodies posing nude in the desert Southwest reveal about the complexities of identity, isolation, and community? It’s an intriguing question posed by Laura Aguilar’s landscape-based body of work, which forms just a fraction of her extensive oeuvre exploring the intersection of gender, race, class, and sexuality.
Over fifty gelatin silver and archival pigment prints culled from her photographic series Nature Self-Portrait (1996), Stillness (1999), Motion (1999), Center (2000-01), and Grounded (2006-07) comprise the Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature exhibition co-curated by Sybil Venegas and Christopher Velasco, which continues through November 27 at Phoenix Art Museum. Every composition was created in the Southwest region of the U.S.
Featured photographs show the artist’s own nude body, with its rotund cascading folds, set within natural environments where her physical form and poses often echo the water, rocks, and plant life that surround her. Several, such as Motion #59 (1999), include the images of other nude women as well. In this case, Aguilar is one of three women posing amid curved, intertwined tree branches that suggest interdependence.
In Untitled from the Grounded series (printed 2018), we see how the vertical crack revealed when Aguilar bends forward resembles the fissure in a boulder she’s facing. Beyond this simple geometric element, the image suggests that the artist’s exposed buttocks represent a subversive mooning of boulders that combine to create a phallus-like form. Elsewhere, in Center #98 (2000-2001), Aguilar creates an entirely different mood by posing seated inside a grotto where it appears her head is hung in despair.
Collectively the photographs in this exhibition, which the museum organized with the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, elucidate the ways Aguilar, a California-based artist who lived from 1959 to 2018, examined relationality and interior life, elevated female empowerment, and critiqued dominant norms related to beauty and conformity.
Meanwhile, museum text panels convey the broad outlines of Aguilar’s biography, including her lesbian, Chicano identity as well as her struggles with depression and her spiritual practices centered on movement and breathing, providing ample context for those who aren’t familiar with her work.
Of course, Aguilar’s nudes in nature call to mind Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s “earth-body” artworks. But it’s equally fascinating to consider the landscape selections shown here in conversation with works by Gabriela Muñoz and Jenea Sanchez, contemporary Latinx artists based in Arizona whose collaboration probing issues related to land, identity, gaze, and personal and collective agency is also on view at the museum.
