Grounded #106, from the series Grounded

Aguilar was a central figure in Chicano and queer art communities in Los Angeles beginning in the 1970s. In the mid-1990s she began photographing herself nude in the landscape. Grounded #106 comes from the last series of photographs that Aguilar made before her premature death. They were shot in Joshua Tree National Park. This work responds, in part, to canonical photographs of the U.S. National Parks and the American West. Introducing a highly personal element to that genre, Aguilar accentuates parallels in the rounded, undulating shapes of her body and those of the rock formations around her.