Reception: Fin Martens: Call Me Every Name For Wandering Home

Fin Martens: Call Me Every Name For Wandering Home
On view: October 28–November 7, 2025
Artist reception: Friday, October 31, 5:00-8:00 pm

Call Me Every Name For Wandering Home is about stray gods, scrap mythologies, fugitive ontologies, and the way stories–real stories, within the living earth–shape worlds within and without. Inspired by the high desert ecologies of New Mexico, this installation blends found and constructed objects and natural materials to weave together a multilayered narrative about belonging, spirituality, and identity. Ursula Le Guin, science fiction author, describes story as a carrier bag for items of significance rather than a conflict, and the artist has taken this to heart, building icons that bear memories and ways of meaning-making.

What spirits still walk among us? What names do we wear to live in the world? What mythologies make themselves a home within us? This exhibition revolves around four stray gods–the markmaker, of red earth and the will to create, the soulseeker, of green waters and the search for meaning, the gardener, of blue skies and a warm hearth, and the wanderer, of the wind that blows through the grasses and across the open road.

The premier solo exhibition by UNM BFA Honors Thesis Student Fin Martens, this installation weaves together myriad media, from social practice to cyanotype, from lasercut to clay. Abstracting a sense of place, this show is the artist’s first public presentation of their research into animism and their own search for identity.