‘Ghost Land’ confronts history
Cities have a way of existing at crossroads in time. While urban environments are constantly evolving in cycles of demolition and rebuilding, traces of history often remain. The past is evident in everything from architectural remnants to street names that hint at a neighborhood’s former inhabitants.
As Indigenous land acknowledgments and recognition of community displacement continue to be a part of our social reckonings, revealing those intersections of past and present has become even more necessary to tell a complete story.
In “Ghost Land,” Patrick Martinez’s latest exhibition, now on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, there’s a powerful tension between history and contemporary life.
In the show’s title work, viewers are confronted by art exemplifying the space between construction and destruction. The first full installation work from Martinez’s “Landscape” series, it uses low, intersecting cinder block walls, topped with breeze blocks that reference both midcentury modern architecture and older Indigenous motifs. The three-sided structure is either in progress or partly demolished, and is adorned with scattered tile work and murals representing Southern and Northern California on opposing sides. Like a ring of fire, “Ghost Land” is surrounded by pink neon tubes, a material frequently used by the Los Angeles artist. Competing with the painted flora in the murals, real bougainvillea grows through one of the blocks.
The work, commissioned by the museum, summons associations of “urban renewal” campaigns, gentrification and community deracination, but also the ruins of Mayan temples and pillaged sacred sites.
Martinez describes his “Landscape” series as “woven Earth tapestries.”
“The prompt for the work is always the materials I find in the city,” said the 43-year-old artist. “That informs my next move.”
Martinez said he had no sketches for “Ghost Land” and was inspired by how his found
“Patrick Martinez: Ghost Land”: Mixed media. Noon-5 p.m. Wednesday; noon-7 p.m. Thursday-Friday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Through Jan. 7. Free. Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, 901 Minnesota St., S.F. 415-226-9250. www.icasf.org
materials recalled memories from his childhood.
“The cinder block made me think about this wall in the 1980s by the East Los Streetscapers that was painted in Boyle Heights,” he explained, referring to the Chicano street art collective and the mural “Filling Up on Ancient Energies,” which was destroyed by Shell Oil.
The incident triggered a landmark lawsuit that paved the way for the California Art Preservation Act. (Martinez also worked with the group as an art student.)
“I saw photos of it as they were knocking it down, and it was almost sculptural,” he recalled.
On the Southern California side of the installation, Martinez pays tribute to both the original mural and his Indigenous Mexican heritage with a series of portraits that show his late cousin transforming into a Mayan ancestor figure. The Northern California side is in conversation with the artist’s Filipinx family and his relationship to the Bay Area, showing a Boracay beach scene blending into the San Francisco coast.
The La Raza Mission District art collective that Martinez’s cousin belonged to is also shown on the mural along with Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, painted along the half-destroyed part of the wall, their presence seemingly about to be lost.
Seeing the “Landscape” series’ central installations felt like a culmination. Both the wall-hung “Landscapes” and the installation use identifiable urban elements like architectural tile, neon, graffiti tags, bodega electronic signs, plexiglass, advertising banners, business signage and wrought iron window bars to capture the vanishing aesthetics of rapidly changing parts of Los Angeles.
Works like “Serpents (Welcome to the Jungle)” and “Kingdom Undone” also show Martinez’s skills as a painter and ceramic artist as portraits, mythical animals and flowers compete with the city materials.
“Patrick’s very much about the L.A. landscape, but with the show, I really wanted to pull it into the larger California context,” said Christine Koppes, curator and head of curatorial affairs at ICA S.F. “I think there’s a lot that people can connect with in different neighborhoods that are being gentrified here.”
After spending even a short time with the work, it’s readily apparent that Martinez’s “Ghost Land” could just as easily be referencing San Francisco’s changing city face, or even streets near the Dogpatch neighborhood where the museum is located.
Martinez, whose work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Museum of American History and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, debuted another large-scale project next door to ICA S.F. in August — a mural inspired by his Pee-Chee folder painting series on the neighboring basketball court.
The original rendering of the mural design is on view in “Ghost Land,” along with an installation of neon works quoting civil rights icons Martin Luther King Jr. (“Darkness Cannot Drive Out Darkness Only Light Can Do That”), Malcolm X (“American Nightmare”) and Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata (“Tierra y Libertad,” which translates to “Land and Freedom”).
There’s also a designated space for visitors to make their own graffiti work in conversation with the exhibition.
But as effective as these other pieces are, it is the central installation that impresses upon viewers how time blurs, with creation and destruction hard to distinguish from one another as we continue to grapple with how to preserve and commemorate communities in the areas they called home.