In a pair of selections from the artist’s Motion series, photographer Laura Aguilar’s body becomes a feature of the landscapes around her. Pictured alongside other women, her downturned face and nude body, angled away from the camera, appear almost topographical – luminous, human features frozen into the landscapes around them and detailed by the shadows of branches and leaves.  

At a gallery talk held February 14^th in The Block’s Leffmann Gallery, 2022-23 Block Curatorial Intern Elizabeth Vazquez invited listeners to look closely at the works and consider the ways that Aguilar’s body relates to the surroundings she photographed herself in. 

That looking generated novel observations on the photographs. One attendee noticed that the figures in the images are different women, rather than the same one photoshopped into multiple poses. Another thought about the vulnerability of Aguilar’s nudity in the wilderness. Another wondered how much it hurt to pose naked on the coarse ground. 

“She felt the most comfortable with her body when she was touched by a breeze or warmed by the sun outside in nature,” Vazquez said. “That was the setting that she took most of her nude photos in.”

Motion #53 and Motion #68 are on view as part of The Block Collects, an exhibition centered around the museum’s 2022-2023 Block Museum Student Associate acquisition. That acquisition, centered around exploring art that considers gender, included Derrick Woods-Morrow’s photograph Frederick on Lake Pontchartrain | after Lincoln Beach, which is featured in the exhibition alongside other works from the museum’s permanent collection that activate and enrich its themes.  

“The Block Collects is an opportunity for us every year to highlight some of that work,” said Essi Rönkkö, Associate Curator of Collections and Academic Programming, in an introduction to the talk. “The stars of the show are our annual student-led acquisitions.”  

Prior to the acquisition of Aguilar’s photos in 2023, Vazquez said The Block’s collection was lacking in thoughtful depictions of fat bodies. Works like those of the French artist Honoré Daumier made mocking spectacle of larger people, and perspectives like Aguilar’s felt missing. 

“The thing about it that was so crazy is some of the only art that we have of fat people is satire,” Vazquez said.  

But in Aguilar’s photos, where her body is photographed in serene outdoor settings, there’s a sense of naturalism and acceptance. 

“One way to look at these is to see that these bodies are being rendered as natural,” she said.  

There’s also the potential to read the works as erotic – Aguilar’s re-imagining of the kind of nudes most often rendered of more conventionally-bodied people. How, then, do we feel with the work representing fat bodies in this way instead? 

“These photos might make you think of 1800s oil paintings of nymphs in baths and running around lush gardens,” Vazquez said. “But they’re taking that kind of art and completely turning it on its head, because these are not the women that you see painted laying in a garden surrounded by Pegasus and grapes and rushing water.”  

As a 2022-23 Curatorial Intern, it was Vazquez’s job to help research artists whose work might align with the theme of the BMSA acquisition. It was through that process that she first came to Aguilar’s art, and initially was interested in a series of photos Aguilar took of Latina Lesbians. Each piece in the series included a portrait of the subject, placed on a larger canvas along with written reflections from the subjects on their own identities.  

“I’ll never forget the day Essi came to me and said that we were moving forward with an acquisition outside of the student associates,” she said.  

Aguilar’s first dabbling in nude photography predates her Motion works. In a series called Clothed/Unclothed, the artist photographed subjects first dressed and then undressed, observing both the construction of gender presentations in their outfits and then, through the diptychs she composed from the images, their change in body language with the vulnerability of nakedness. 

“She switched to doing self-portrait work that was nude,” Vazquez said. “And I think that’s really interesting because, as I mentioned, she was disabled in many ways.”  

Aguilar suffered from “a lot of internal turmoil and mental health issues,” Vazquez noted, and through her photography work she worked through them and forged a more accepting relationship with her body. Aguilar was also colorblind, though outside of the works featured in The Block Collects, she did shoot digitally and in color.  

A third acquisition, not currently on display but viewable through The Block’s online collection or in person via scheduled appointment, from the artist’s Grounded series, Grounded #105, contrasts Aguilar’s form against a rock. Across the bottom of the image lays Aguilar’s body, abstracted by the edges of the frame that crop out her shoulders, belly, and legs so that she becomes a shape not dissimilar from that of the stone behind her.

Color plays a key role here in differentiating the two forms and accentuating their textural differences. 

“People pay a lot for the color that she introduces in her photos,” Vazquez said. “But she couldn’t see color the way that it’s captured in the digital photography.” 

Vazquez also related Motion #53 and Motion #68 to other works on the in The Block Collects. She observed their similarity of subject with Nana, a Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture of a large person dancing, and of candid posing with Krystal and Ruth, from the series a different kind of love story: for us by zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal.  

“They look like they’re candid, but they’re posed with the intention of looking candid,” she said. 

The Block Collects is on view until March 3, 2024. It was also on view from September 20 to December 3, 2023.