L. Kent Wolgamott: Art and myth in 'Coming Home'

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Enrique Martinez Celaya’s “Coming Home” is a perfect installation, an art work that takes the space in which it is placed and turns it into a different environment while deepening the questions raised by its individual elements and creating a sense of myth.

On view through Oct. 29 at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, the central figures in “Coming Home” are an oversized dying elk and a small boy, who can “look” between the elk’s antlers and see himself in a mirror. Surrounding them is a wallpiece that is a blown-up photograph of a forest. Inside the forest is a nude woman. She also appears in one of the framed photos that are affixed to the wall piece. So do the boy and the elk.

A deeply powerful piece, “Coming Home” takes you into the forest, then asks the big questions — Who am I? How do I relate to the rest of the world? What is the nature of life and death? And so on.

Martinez Celaya doesn’t try to answer those questions. But he loads up the installation with symbolic elements and material. Examples: The elk and boy are made of tar and feathers, bringing to the piece all that it entails; the woman functions as a witness to the rite of passage taking place between the central figures; the forest and shoreline in the photographs set the work in nature.

All of those elements combine to give the piece resonance that works on a deeper level than most art, whether historic or contemporary. In dealing with issues of mortality, identity, the relationship between self and others through specific pieces, Martinez Celaya operates in the realm most often occupied by religion, psychology, philosophy and, from ancient times, myth.

“To an extent, I feel my whole entire project is a construction of a myth,” Martinez Celaya said. “Matthew Barney tries to construct a myth with a certain imagery of a different nature. When I started working as an artist, I realized that I wanted to rebuild reality from some very basic building blocks. Culture wasn’t really involved. The basic building blocks of reality are the ones we all know.

“You know trees, I know trees. I might be Cuban-born, you might be from Nebraska, but we both have a relationship to trees. And our relationship to trees is fairly constant. The landscape, the questioning of witnessing and reflections and everybody coming of age, it may be slightly different for slightly different reasons. But for all of us it is a momentous situation. Those are the kind of things I’m interested in tapping. When you’re trying to work using some fundamental building blocks of the nature of experience, you inevitably tap into the same construction as myth. Myths give shape to those momentous parts of life. That’s the same thing religion does.”

The elk and the boy in “Coming Home” were recently donated to Sheldon by German collector Dieter Rosenkranz, who purchased the piece after it was displayed initially in 2000. But the rest of the installation is new.

The figures were originally surrounded by works on paper. Now they are surrounded by photographs, both in frames and on the walls. With the gallery doors covered in plastic and sound piped in, the gallery becomes not a series of objects, but a single piece. For Martinez Celaya, that work is new.

“It feels definitely like a different work… The elk and the boy, with the question of identity, self and other, and so on, I have worked since then on many other projects. Now it allows me to treat this as if it was work I was doing today. …

“The photographs and all the objects themselves were done six years ago, five years ago, four years ago in the case of the photographs. The conceptualization though is of my thinking today. … It feels like a bridge from where I was to where I am. If I were to date this work now, I’d have to say 2000-2006.”

The “Coming Home” installation was also designed specifically for the space in Sheldon’s Philip Johnson-designed high modernist building.

“I didn’t want this elk and boy to be brought into the modernist building and put right in the middle of a gallery and force the public to make this transportation in their mind,” Martinez Celaya said. “I wanted the building itself to change. I didn’t want to put a bunch of trees right in the middle of the space and create some sort of diorama. I wanted the whole transformation to have sort of a conceptual feeling. So in response to the architecture, that’s why it’s on the walls. So you still have the rectangle, but you’re invited to take the rectangle and let it be the forest. But it’s all in the mind, the whole environment is in the mind now.”

It is a measure of the effectiveness of “Coming Home” that the environment seems so real when you walk into the gallery. Sure, you’re on the travertine marble floors and the room is familiar with museum lighting, etc. But there is enough power in the objects and their relationships to one another and to the viewer that the familiar room becomes a space for contemplation, an area that creates its own reality.

I’ve seen “Coming Home” a half-dozen times since the exhibition opened in late August. Each time, its enveloping nature and symbolically laden power have transformed the room and made me think about the issues that are the heart of Martinez Celaya’s art. For me, it is the most important contemporary art exhibition in Lincoln this year and arguably for many years.

My indepth interview with Martinez Celaya, which goes well beyond “Coming Home”  and was conducted during his late August visit for the exhibition’s opening, can be heard in its entirety on the Variations on the Visual podcast at journalstar.com.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or at kwolgamott@journalstar.com.