San Francisco
Pablo Guardiola: Maintenance Yard at Romer Young Gallery
Today from our sister publication Art Practical, we bring you a review of Pablo Guardiola’s Maintenance Yard at Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco. Author Genevieve Quick notes, “Guardiola positions history as an active investigatory process rather than a passive reiteration of fact.” This article was originally published on September 25, 2014.
Pablo Guardiola. Sharks 1, 2014; digital C-print; 10 x 15 in. Courtesy of Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco.
Having lived in San Francisco and currently residing in San Juan, in his native Puerto Rico, Pablo Guardiola fuses the histories of the two locations in his exhibition Maintenance Yard. Both coastal areas have a legacy of European and American seafaring expansion, and Guardiola uses markers of this history to explore cultural and nautical imperialism. While many of Guardiola’s references may not be readily apparent, patient and curious viewers will find in his juxtapositions of imagery provocative questions about how we understand and organize meaning.
Guardiola’s photo collage Drake (2013) references Sir Francis Drake (1540–1596), a global explorer and exploiter who circumnavigated the globe for the British empire. The British honor Drake with a monument in Plymouth, U.K., and his legacy as the first European explorer in Northern California is memorialized in Marin County’s Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and Drakes Bay. (Contrastingly, some Puerto Ricans denounce Drake for his leading role in the British attack on San Juan in 1595.) In Guardiola’s photograph of Drake’s U.K. monument, the figure stands heroically with one hand resting on the globe while a sword hangs from his hip. Behind this image, Guardiola has placed a photograph of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that depicts several gentlemen observing the city against a smoke-filled sky. With Drake’s monument perched on a pillar and the earthquake photographed from above, Guardiola creates a perspectival relationship between the discovery of the Bay Area and San Francisco’s momentary destruction.
