Stillness

Laura Aguilar

Exhibition: Jun 10 – Jul 18, 1999


For the self-portrait series Stillness, produced during her two-month stay in San Antonio, Laura Aguilar navigates the emotional and representational landscape of her physical body; the pictorial syntax that informs the production and reception of her image; the spiritual possibilities that exist within and with nature; and the seductive potential and beauty particular to classic black and white photography.

These photographs are beautifully disquieting. They participate in a kind of subdued grotesque drawn from and encouraging of an aesthetics of reverence. Reverence for the mysteries of nature, reverence for the mysteries of the self, reverence for the contemplative communion found in the sublime unification of both. The artist has coaxed a kind of radiant immanence through the fusion of herself (sometimes with another woman) with the intense landscape of Southwest Texas – the desert-like dirt earth, the gnarled and imposing trunks of the Cypress, the graceful draping of ornate and low-hung tree branches, the unique sculptural authority of rock and boulder formations, the delicate waves of mesquite brush and Johnson grass, the muddy waters of the desperate local creeks and skinny rivers, and the empty horizon and infiniteness of the expansive and always fickle Texas sky. Within this magical landscape – exotic to all but its native inhabitants – the artist has placed herself where one might otherwise expect or hope to sight a roadrunner, coyote or buck.

The artist is conscious of the unconventional contours that constitute the parameters of her physical body: she is large, her torso draped in folds of fat not unlike the gnarled protrusions at the stumps of the Cypress trees with which she appears in images such as Stillness #22 and Stillness #23. While earlier portrait photographers who have cast their eye on the diverse range of human physical appearances have often chosen, like Diane Arbus and Joel Peter-Witkin, to focus on the freakishness of their subjects, Aguilar naturalizes her subjects. In this sense the aim and process of her photographic portraiture, including her self-portraiture, constitutes a decided departure from that of so many of her contemporaries. Unlike Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman or Cathie Opie, she is not interested in capturing or exaggerating the so-called perverse; rather, Aguilar adheres to a more classical aesthetic.

Her fascination with the tonal contrasts and formal clarity possible in black and white photography derives from the landscapes and still-lifes produced by the first wave of American photographers who demanded that the photographic medium was capable of being transformed into art; she is especially indebted to Ansel Adam’s iconic landscapes of the American West and Edward Weston’s precious renderings of seashells, bell peppers and other small gifts of nature. Although her explorations in self-portraiture began in 1990, her utilization of nature as both backdrop and intuitive guidance is more recent and has been directly inspired by the photographer Judy Dater, with whom Aguilar first studied in 1988 and who remains a friend and mentor. In 1996, Aguilar produced a nature self-portrait of herself positioned behind three small boulders in the California desert, her naked body configured in a fetal position with her torso and face—as in many of her self-portraits—facing away from both the camera and the viewer’s gaze. Inspired by Dater’s earlier photographic explorations with nudity and nature, Aguilar titled her 1996 image Her Spirit Moves Me, A Homage to Judy Dater. For the past four years, Aguilar has continued to work out a process that involves placing herself naked within a natural landscape and follows an intuitive procedure that seeks to align her response to the immediate environment with that of her camera.

Although the artist is primarily concerned with the spiritual and emotional impetus of her practice, her particular deployment of the female nude aligns with more consciously critical considerations of the representation of women – especially ‘the nude’ – in art history and popular culture, as first developed by Carol Duncan, Lucy Lippard, Laura Mulvey, Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock and other feminist critics in the early 1970s. The dominant pictorial tradition of ‘the nude,’ a genre assumed to connote the representation of the female body, was rigorously critiqued by second wave feminist artists and theoreticians for its establishment of pictorial codes that align with the political tenants of patriarchy and delineate the female body as an object of sexual access for male viewers and consumers.

Placing herself within nature (a setting, unlike those featured in either late 19th-century painting or early 20th-century photographic reproductions of naked women, which cannot be confused with a brothel), positioning her body according to postures and mannerisms suggestive of repose and contentment and averting her gaze from the viewer are among the stylistic codes, Aguilar employs which place her system of representation outside of and in opposition to objectifying pictures of women. The occasional appearance of another nude women with her – such as in Stillness # 15, Stillness # 26, Stillness #27 (which features a woman back-bending supine on the artist’s back), and Stillness #28 – further removes her iconography from an assumption of female sexual performance for men. Naked, and with nature, Aguilar wants to be with women. Installed at ArtPace in downtown San Antonio, these images take on a particular political commentary regarding local history. Before WWII an area not far from the art foundation, in a neighborhood bounded by Durango Street on the south and Market Street on the north, supported one of the largest institutionalized networks of prostituted women in the United States. According to a local historian, the “Class A” brothels in what San Antonio called its “Sporting District,” were decorated with “paintings of nudes” as well as crap tables, roulette wheels and velvet drapes. (1)

-Laura Cottingham

Laura Cottingham is an art critic who lives in New York City.

(1) Mark Louis Rybczyk, San Antonio Uncovered (Plano, Texas: Wordware, 1992), 20.

Artist

Laura Aguilar

Rosemead, California, USA

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.
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—people of color, gays and lesbians and large people. Her portraits are known for their collaborative sensibility—the 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 generatSpring 2020 Hudson Showroom Exhibitor
Spring 2020 Main Space Exhibitored by advertising and media.

See More

Curators

Amada Cruz

Los Angeles, CA
Read Bio

Kellie Jones

New York, NY
Read Bio

Nancy Rubins

Topanga, California, USA

Born in 1952 in Naples, Texas, Californian Nancy Rubins received her MFA from the University of California, Davis. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at Paul Kasmin Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Venice Biennale Aperto. Rubins’ work was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ Helter Skelter exhibit in 1992. Rubins teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Art Department. She has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Read Bio

Annette DiMeo Carlozzi

Austin, TX

Independent curator Annette DiMeo Carlozzi has built an expansive practice across the US as a curator of modern and contemporary art, focusing on ideas and experiences, artists and audiences. Raised in Boston and trained at the Walker Art Center, she has served in a variety of foundational roles: as the first curator at Laguna Gloria Art Museum (now The Contemporary Austin); executive director of the Aspen Art Museum and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Visual Arts Producer for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta; and in multiple positions—ranging from founding modern and contemporary curator to Deputy Director for Art and Programs to Curator at Large—at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. Committed to expanding the canon, she has created notable exhibitions (Luis Jiménez, Paul Chan, Michael Smith, Deborah Hay, Negotiating Small TruthsAmerica/AmericasDesire), produced important commissions (Nancy Holt, Siah Armajani, Betye Saar, Vito Acconci, Byron Kim, Teresita Fernández), and acquired major works by a wide range of international artists. Carlozzi has had a long relationship with Artpace, having served as an early advisor, artist interviewer, and program panelist, member of the 1998 artist selection panel and 2001–03 Board of Visitors. In 2015 she curated Immersed from Linda Pace’s art collection, now called Ruby City.

Read Bio

Dan Cameron

Newport Beach, California

From 2012 to 2015 he was Chief Curator at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California. In 2006, Dan Cameron founded the Biennial Prospect New Orleans, where he worked at until 2011. From 1995 to 2005 he was Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York, where he developed numerous group exhibitions, such as East Village USA and Living inside the Grid, and several individual shows dedicated to the artists Martin Wong, William Kentridge, Carolee Schneemann, Carroll Dunham, Doris Salcedo, José Antonio Hernández Diez, among others.
As independent curator he has organized many exhibitions that brought him international attention, such as El arte y su doble (Fundación Caixa, Madrid, 1987); El jardín salvaje (Fundación Caixa, Barcelona, 1991); Cocido y crudo (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1995), among many others. In 2003, he was the Artistic Director of the 8th Istanbul Biennial, and in 2006, Co-curator of the 5th Taipei Biennial.
He has published hundreds of texts in books, catalogues and magazines, and has given numerous talks and conferences at museums and universities around the world, also carrying out an important teaching activity in New York.

Read Bio

Hans Ulrich Obrist

London, England

Hans Ulrich-Obrist is the Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, positions created for Ulrich-Obrist in April 2006. As a curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France since 2000, among many other exhibitions he organized solo shows with Jonas Mekas (2003), Anri Sala (2004), and Cerith Wyn Evans (2006). Before this position Ulrich-Obrist was an independent curator for a decade, organizing the group show Take Me I’m Yours at the Serpentine (1995) and Retrace Your Steps: Remember at the John Soane Museum (1999), also in London, England. Ulrich-Obrist was a panelist in 1998 for the 1999-2000 year of artists, and was invited to be a speaker at the 2003 symposium, but was unable to come due to illness.
Photo by Dominik Gigler

Read Bio

Related
Exhibitions

View