What is the opposite of nostalgia? The haunting, playful, mournful sculpture at the center of Enrique Martínez Celaya’s exhibition at the Wende Museum is a scale model of his childhood home, built from white sugar and large enough to enter, though access is forbidden. It does a lot of things, but fondly looking back is not one of them.

      Based on the modernist home the artist’s father built in a coastal Cuban village between 1957 and 1963—a volatile window spanning the Cuban Revolution, the Missile Crisis, and the US embargo—the structure recalls an era of intense psychological suspension, both personal and geopolitical. Back then, its clean geometry clashed with the local architectural vernacular, drawing quiet friction and suspicion from neighbors. Today, that real-world house functions as a wedding venue in Cuba, still bearing the unhealed scars of the Communist Revolution, and perhaps the echoes of its origins still whispering in its walls.

      The years spent in those rooms were not halcyon days for the child; they were defined by the sudden absence of his father, who left ahead for Spain to secure a path of escape into exile, leaving the household in prolonged limbo. Through this fragile architecture, the installation delves into how ancestral/familial ruptures warp a child’s interiority and emerging sense of identity. Materiality is more than a metaphor here, although it certainly is that. But because sugar, chosen for its meaning, also behaves in a way that is both solidly strong and vanishingly delicate, it expands beyond the roots of its context.

        However we got here, perennial revisitation and latter-day exegeses of his own past have formed a central poetic lexicon for Martínez Celaya over the years—an accounting through the iconography of choppy seas, rediscovered artifacts, evocative botanicals, spirit animals, and a young boy carrying his home on his back—and have now arrived back at his literal childhood home. Well, a painter and sculptor’s vision of it. It has the energy of a fable wherein each element is quite obviously carrying layers of symbolic meaning with deep significance to the artist. This is his way. But his special gift is for leaving room for the viewer to craft their own understanding of the poetic dimension and enter the story on their own terms.

        Formally, the house establishes a stark dichotomy. Visitors who approach the designated viewing spots peer inside as best they can, feeling themselves in the voyeur role, and also acutely noticing the impossibility of physically entering it is akin to the impossisibility of revisiting one’s own past. In short, they can’t go home again, either. The room’s optical effects amplify the uncanny, skeletal luminescence of the interior space—an ivory-toned diorama that contains no familiar domestic comforts and feels like a surrealist’s dream. Amidst this curious backdrop, unexpected details like a rooster made of sugar and scenic paintings he created for this purpose emerge along with other emblems of the artist’s private recollections.

        “Outside” the house, the gallery installation expands through a further sugar-built objects like a nearly life-sized white horse pulling a sledge, intersected by an industrial conveyor belt which links to the roof of the house, always pouring more sugar, filling it with a pile that never grows larger, and cannot but hint at the dark underside of the island’s storied sugar cane trade. Less explicit in their imagery but no less salient to the Hero’s Journey under discussion, are a number of paintings that map the same psychological terrain, at various other points in his story. Extending Martínez Celaya’s long-standing preoccupation with migration, physical burden, and rootlessness, “The Sextant” lives up to its title. It is an instrument built not to locate a destination, but to measure vast, unbridgeable distances—such as between a disruptive past and the self that was created by surviving it.

On view through October 11 in Culver City. wendemuseum.org.

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in downtown LA. Formerly the L.A. Weekly arts editor, she is a contributor to the LA Times, Alta Journal, WhiteHot, and other culture publications nationally.