Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
Guadalupe Rosales
51
Floors 5 and 6
Born 1980 in Redwood City, CA
Lives in Los Angeles, CA
Guadalupe Rosales has an abiding commitment to depicting and documenting her home, East Los Angeles, and the Latinx communities of Southern California. As she has written: “I have been photographing sites primarily in East LA, where I spent most of my teenage years—my neighborhood, the home I grew up in, Whittier Boulevard, alleyways—and the site where the lives of loved ones have been lost. These photographs hold the essence of my own memories here with my friends and family—intimate, warm, haunting and inviting. Most of them were taken while the majority of the city slept. There is an abstract quality of night that is potent with dreams and escape and journey that answers to my desire to not capture the literal events—many violent—of growing up in East LA. The night is where we could feel the complexity of being both free and chased. In this way, nights in East Los Angeles had its own reality. A surreality. Like a waking dream. This work is also about honoring the dead and the living. The process of photographing these locations has not always been easy: It can trigger traumatic memories to surface. But the work guides me through difficult questions that bring me better understandings of my past and my present, as well as offering new revelations.”
Winter Solstice / Hazards, 2022
Guadalupe Rosales, Winter Solstice / Hazards, 2022. Archival pigment print, frame, 48 × 62 in. (121.9 × 157.5 cm). Collection of the artist; courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
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Guadalupe Rosales, Fire in the sky
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Guadalupe Rosales: My name is Guadalupe Rosales.
Los Angeles became a dark place for me towards the late nineties, early 2000s, and I left. I moved back to L.A. and the first thing I did was go back to these siteswhere I was raised. Sites that were considered safe spaces for me. And the energy was still there, at night especially.
The times when I hung out with my friends and my lovers, being a teenager, being out on the streets, we were confronted by violence and the police, but there's also this essence of home with that. And that is what I'm capturing, ghostly remnants or markings.
For me, I have a different relationship to these sites, but there are multiple stories similar to mine. And in some ways that's what I'm trying, or I guess I'm capturing with these photographs. They could be very specific to a location, but I'm also really interested in what is being activated for other people.
I’ve shared other photos that I've taken in the past of other locations and I'm surprised by how people respond and just this familiarity in them, even though they don't know exactly where these photos are from.
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Guadalupe Rosales, Winter Solstice/Hazards
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Guadalupe Rosales, Winter Solstice/Hazards
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Guadalupe Rosales: My name is Guadalupe Rosales, and I am an artist based in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles became a dark place for me towards the late nineties, early 2000s. Things started to almost accumulate or build up. My cousin dying in ‘96 and then just seeing friends go to prison, dying even. And I left. I disconnected myself from family and community here in East L.A. And I started seeing the ways in which L.A. or my communities were being described, like gangs, people dying and all this stuff, which part of it is true. But at the same time, like you know there’s actually something more real, more authentic.
One of the photographs that I have in the show is called Winter Solstice. That is a photo of where my cousin was killed, and I've been going back every year on the winter solstice because that's when he was murdered. Is this something that I'm going to keep repeating over and over and over and over? I don't have an answer to that question.
And something more, I would say, for myself in a deeper way is every time that I go to where my cousin was killed, even through the land that is there, the soil that is there, I still think about his blood, his existence is still living there.