Clothed/Unclothed: Laura Aguilar's Radical Vulnerability

Clothed/Unclothed is the name of a radical 1990s series of diptych portrait photographs by Los Angeles based artist Laura Aguilar, who openly struggles with her own disabled queer Latina subjectivity and embodiment through her self-portraiture and video works. Using the bodies of friends, colleagues, and herself, Aguilar’s singular practice exploits the medium of photographic portraiture to depict myriad experiences beyond the able-bodied, white, middle-class, heteronormative body ideals found in mainstream or most fine-art (male-authored) images of women (and sometimes men)—unclothing  as it were the subjects she portrays. This talk thus addresses Aguilar’s brilliant mining of the capacity of photographic portraiture to produce counter narratives of alternative modes of being in the world.