Press Release: Laura Aguilar

05.15.99

THE INTERNATIONAL ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE PROGRAM

New Works: 99.2

Laura Aguilar, ROSEMEAD, CA

Mona Hatoum, LONDON, ENGLAND

Regina Vater, AUSTIN, TX

Exhibition: June 11, 1999 ?ly 18, 1999

Opening: Thursday, June 10, 1999, 6:30-8:30 PM

Artists' Dialogue: Friday, June 11, 1999 at 6:30 PM

ArtPace, A Foundation for Contemporary Art | San Antonio presents New Works:
99.2, a series of installations by the current participants of our International Artist-in-
Residence Program. An opening celebration will take place on Thursday, June 10, and
the following evening, Laura Cottingham, a New York-based art critic, will moderate an
artists' dialogue.

Laura Aguilar

Photographer Laura Aguilar has investigated portraiture since she emerged in the late
1980s. Her stark black-and-white photographs document subjects whose images and
stories are under-represented in mainstream culture?ple of color, gays and lesbians
and large people. Her portraits are known for their collaborative sensibility? subjects
are encouraged to investigate and negotiate with the artist from both sides of the lens. In
the late 1990s, Aguilar turned the camera on herself, making dramatic nude self-portraits
in which her body is contrasted with the rough terrain of the desert landscape and in
which the body and landscape become one. The works continue her efforts to challenge
societal assumptions about beauty, offering an alternative to the airbrushed, artificial
depictions of women generated by advertising and media.

At ArtPace, Aguilar continues her investigations with self-portraiture. The series
began at a women's photography workshop in the New Mexico desert and continued in
the Texas landscape. The photographs show the artist, posing nude with other female
figures, posed back to back and reaching to the sky. Referencing a women's exercise
textbook from the 1930s, Aguilar's new body of work introduces objects and additional
subjects to her photographs, with a classical sense of beauty and composition. Unlike her
previous self-portraits, in which the figure becomes integrated into the landscape and
grounded to the horizon, the new works express a freedom of movement. The images
look almost like documentation of choreography as nude figures intertwine with grace,
action and public sensuality. The black-and-white photographs are displayed in the
exhibition space, alongside mural-size prints.

Born in 1959 in San Gabriel, CA, Aguilar lives and works in Rosemead, CA, outside
of Los Angeles. She has studied photography at East Los Angeles Community College
and has participated in the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. She has received grants
from Art Matters Inc., LACE, the California Arts Council and Lightworks. She has had a
number of solo exhibitions at venues including the Los Angeles Photography Center,
CA; LACE, Los Angeles, CA; Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, CA; Zone
Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, England; and the Fundacio la Caixa, Barcelona, Spain.
Her work has been included in many group exhibitions, including Sunshine et Noir:
Art in L.A. at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Sexual Politics:
Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" In Feminist Art History at the Armand Hammer
Museum, Los Angeles, CA; In a Different Light at the University of California,
Berkeley; and Bad Girls at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.
She also participated in the Aperto section of the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Aguilar was selected by: Dan Cameron, Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Amada Cruz,
Kellie Jones, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Nancy Rubins

445 North Main Avenue San Antonio TX 78205 t 210 212 4900 f 210 212 4990 www.artpace.org