Presentation 2 : Laura Aguilar

The artist that really stood out to me in last week’s presentations was artist/photographer Laura Aguilar who has recently passed away. Laura Aguilar's photographs are captivating and stunning. Through her work, Aguilar has set a new way of looking at the body and adding larger bodies to the art world sphere. Placing herself in the nude along with the land, photographs of herself on giant boulders in a desert landscape. Laura Aguilar’s work pioneered the possibilities of Chicanx transgressive art making. The work that really stood out to me was the “How Mexican is Mexican” piece which works sort of as a triptych involving three photographs of women, an illustrated border around each photograph, a quote by the person in the photograph, and at the very bottom four thermometers illustrated. The authors of the quotes explain their relationships to their own identities of being of Mexican descent and the thermometers reveal to the audience just how connected the subjects are to their ownership of their identity. The thermometers illustrate this by starting with really low temperature with the subject that seems a bit removed from her Mexican identity, continuing with medium, and on to a high temperature where the subject knows and feels very much connected to her Mexican roots.