May 16 at 12:00 PM - Sale 2669 -

Sale 2669 - Lot 306

Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500
LAURA AGUILAR (1959-2018)
Nature Self-Portrait #12. Silver print, the image measuring 14x19 inches (35.6x48.3 cm.), the sheet 16x20 inches (40.6x50.8 cm.). 1996

This print is accompanied by a letter of provenance from Michelle Hirschhorn-Smith, former Curator Zone Gallery and a second letter from David Sinden, former Director & Co-Founder, Zone Photographic Gallery

Provenance: Laura Aguilar; to the Zone Gallery in 1997; to the Globe Gallery, 1998

This photograph was exhibited in the collaborative project Shifting Terrains: Laura Aguilar (USA) & Maxine Walker (UK), a two-person exhibition that was co-produced by the Zone Gallery (Newcastle Upon Tyne) and Autograph ABP (London). The artists were commissioned to produce a new body of work for the exhibition that opened at Zone Gallery on March 6, 1997 (through April 22, 1997, followed by a tour to the Montage Gallery in Derby). These exhibition prints are authenticated by the Trust as Artist Proofs of the Nature Self-Portrait series.

Aguilar produced several large-scale black-and-white images for the exhibition, including eight 16x20 prints which we believe she hand printed in her dark room in Los Angeles. These works, which were untitled at the time, later became known as the Nature Self-Portrait series. As far as we know, the images were shot on a road trip to New Mexico in 1996, but the Zone Gallery exhibition was the first time that they were exhibited.

After the exhibition Aguilar gave these prints to Zone Gallery to be held in the Zone archive. However on the closure of Zone Gallery in 1998, these works were given to Globe Gallery and have been maintained by Rashida Davison, Director of Globe Gallery, since then.
Laura Aguilar's groundbreaking work focused primarily on the queer, Latinx, and working class communities of her native Los Angeles, using portraiture to examine gender identity, class, and body politics, as well as mental health and representation within the art world. Some of her early series of work focused on the communities of which she was a part, including "Latina Lesbians," "How Mexican is Mexico," and "Plush Pony," the last of which documented patrons at a working-class lesbian bar. But far more than a documentarian, Aguilar also turned the camera on herself, using her body to create vulnerable images investigating her own exploration of identity and relationship with her body and mental health. Now considered as vastly ahead of her time, Aguilar posed herself as an element of the Southwestern landscape, curling her body around rocks or curved on the ground, her face turned away or shielded from the viewer. She is both seen and unseen, in work that is both poetic and poignant.
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