It was in the living room, and every time I saw it, it literally freaked me out."ĭelano Dunn, It’s the Light in my Eyes, 2021, 41 x 32 in. This piece was directly affected by substance abuse. I had it up in the house, my family was gone, and they were in Cincinnati at the time. This was the piece I was working on right before the darkest time. I don't know if saying the drugs helped is the right thing to say, but specifically with the piece, The Light in My Eyes, maybe it's valid. So, I would smoke weed, hoping that the smoke would help me push through that, and it would, but I still had this fear of the work. I would panic and get really nervous before going into the studio. As it got progressively worse, I kind of shut down. “But because of the depression, I had been hitting these roadblocks, unable to get my thoughts to coalesce and having all these starts and stops.
"I started working on the show in the spring of 2020,” Dunn explained. However, in this period of time, it was his salvation in his ongoing battle with his depression and a way to channel his creativity.
Growing up in South Central LA to a father that was a victim of the crack epidemic, drugs were something Delano stayed away from for all of his life for fear of repeating his father's mistakes. It does not rain in Southern California and definitely does not snow in LA, and similarly, Delano's depressive mind state and experimentation with drugs was something that was unusual for him. The title, Snowfall in LA, refers to the period of time in which Delano was creating the exhibition as being something of an anomaly in his life. The result is a disruption to any fantasy of an equal, just, or even post-racial society that the viewer may possess. In doing this, Delano plays the master chef, mixing the perfect combination of sweet candy and bitter medicine to almost Trojan Horse the viewer into the analysis of some of the darker aspects of history. He simultaneously pulls the viewer in with his colorful backgrounds, cute wallpapers, and shiny embellishments, only to pull the veil away revealing a darker and more sordid reality. In this exhibition, Delano continues to do what he does best in re-contextualizing historical images, many of which he pulled from illustrations of Uncle Tom's Cabi n and various vintage comic books. On the other end, it channels the frustration and angst of this period of his life into an unsettling critique of the representation of Black figures and the Black bodies in canonical history. On one end it chronicles a difficult time in his life dealing with a depressive episode and a resulting substance abuse problem during the height of the pandemic. Courtesy of the Artist.ĭelano Dunn's Snowfall in LA places us deep into a complicated web of introspection by the artist. Gusty winds at times for the afternoons in the alpine areas.Delano Dunn, Where People are Rolling in Snow, 2021, 50 x 40 in. Daytime temperatures on the ski hill will be near minus 10 C. Due to the instability always the chance of brief heavier flurries. A few cms of snow expected with each impulse. In this flow from the northern Gulf of Alaska there will be a couple of embedded impulses of instability which will give flurries for Monday and again on Wednesday. Monday to Wednesday : For the outlook period we will continue with a cool NW flow pattern.