Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Pearl

For his 2013 SITE Santa Fe exhibition, The Pearl, ENRIQUE MARTINEZ CELAYA transformed the museum into an immersive, multi-sensory installation environment that included painting, sculpture, video, waterworks, and olfactory interventions centered on the notion of home as both a point of departure and a destination. 

Figures and landscapes drawn from specific references in his own life morph into archetypal symbols alluding to larger existential concerns of being and consciousness, memory, exile, birth, death and coming of age, among others. The resultant works are engaging yet enigmatic.

The book—developed in tandem with the exhibition—includes a broad range of drawings, writings, and images of works in process with images of the completed installation, to create a final object that is both a record of the development of the show, and a comprehensive study of the artist’s work.