Guadalupe Rosales, Winter Solstice/Hazards

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.