https://www.frieze.com/article/laura-aguilar-show-and-tell-2021-review
EXCERPT: Laura Aguilar – who died in 2018 at the age of 59 – was a lesbian, working-class, Chicanx artist who, in Sybil Venegas’s essay ‘Connected to the Land’ (2018), is quoted saying that she ‘grew up on the edge of nothingness’ in California’s South San Gabriel Valley. Struggles with auditory dyslexia – a disability that went undiagnosed – and the death of her beloved grandmother marked her early years with a profound sense of isolation and self-loathing: ‘For as long as I can remember,’ the photographer darkly recalled in her video, The Body 2 (1995), ‘I have always thought I should be dead.’ Clinical depression and an increase in body weight followed – issues that helped fuel a decades-long practice, rooted in the politics of self-love, which has only in recent years received its due attention.