I Am YEG Arts: Dwayne Martineau

On November 20, 2023, the EAC and our friends at the Edmonton Community Foundation will celebrate 25 years of Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund (EATF) awards. In recognition of the upcoming anniversary of EATF and our roster of more than 200 EATF recipients since the award’s inception in 1998, we’re highlighting some of the incredible past EATF recipients on the EAC blog. Today we feature Dwayne Martineau, two-time EATF recipient (2016 and 2021) and multi-disciplinary powerhouse… 

Dwayne Martineau has a way of approaching the familiar with a sense of discovery and wonder. As a visual artist, musician, photographer, and videographer, much of his work starts from an intimate interaction with nature and proceeds to challenge perspectives using distortion, symmetry, and animism. In this week’s I Am YEG Arts feature, Dwayne tells us about his unique approach to capturing the natural world, why he’s interested in creating public art, and what he’s working on next.

Tell us about your connection to Edmonton and what keeps you living and working here. 

I came to Edmonton for university in my late teens and shortly after that I volunteered at CJSR, the campus and community radio station. It changed my perspective of what music could be. That’s where I started finding my tribe, and that sort of put me on a course where I just got wrapped up with one arts community after another. I met writers, artists, musicians, film makers who all became friends of mine and we collaborated together, eventually leading me to a community of Indigenous contemporary artists that I’m very happy to be working with now. 

Collaborating on projects always terrified me, but I learned that if you just say yes to those scary things, you force yourself to level up and keep getting better and better, and that leads to bigger and better scary things. 

I live and work in Edmonton because it’s central to my family. It’s the landscape that’s in my heart and the support network of artists and creators that I have built over the last 20 – 25 years or so is invaluable. 

How did you get your start as a photographer? Was it always Plan A?

Thinking of photography as being a ​“plan A” ascribes an amount of foresight and planning to me that I may not be responsible for. I think of myself more as an artist who uses photography and video as part of my process. Mostly because it’s a great way to explore nature and share perspectives with other people. My process involves a lot of just going out and exploring, lots of nooks and crannies, and finding little hidden elements of nature that really speak to me. And one of the only ways of sharing that with people is through video or through photography. 

I worked as a commercial photographer for almost 10 years, and for that I did go to NAIT for two years. But pretty quickly, that path of being a commercial photographer evolved back to my roots of experimental conceptual artwork, and again, I found myself more looking through photography than just trying to make photographs. 

You have touched on nature as being a big part of your work as an artist. Tell us about how you explore nature and the physicality of light through your experimental landscape photography. 

I’ve been thinking about my relationship to nature a lot lately and wondering where a lot of my perspective comes from. I’ve been tracing it back to the childhood summers where my extended family squatted on a chunk of crown land all summer every summer, up in the Lakeland area a few hours north of Edmonton. The way that the parents kept the children reined in in an environment where we otherwise had completely free rein was by telling us that if we went a little too far to the right, it was nothing but quicksand, and if we went a little too far to the left, it was nothing but bears. And I don’t know how true that was – I think there was a little bit of truth in that – but it really instilled this kind of fear, reverence, awe, and wonder for nature that I think really carries through into my work today. It is kind of a curiosity and an exploration that is based on putting nature up on that pedestal and viewing it with the reverence that it deserves. What I’m trying to do in my work is shift perspective and see the world in a different way so that I can better understand those things like trees and bugs and the plants that live life at a completely different scale from us. They’re living life at a scale that we don’t really understand until we slow down and try not to take it for granted. 

I use lights and optics and cameras because it is a powerful way to shift your perspective. With cameras and lenses, mirrors, things like that, you can really play with the scales of time and space and inspire new modes of thinking about the world around us. I like reminding people that light is a physical object that we can warp and bend, and that it is an object that brings information to our eyes and when you change the way light is acting, it changes that information and changes your perspective. One thing I like to do is black out a room, install an aperture and turn it into a camera obscura, which is basically turning a room into what the inside of a camera looks like where you see the world from the outside, projected upside down onto the walls of the room inside. If you show that to a child who’s grown up with video games and billion-dollar CGI effects in movies and TV it will blow their minds! They don’t understand what’s happening and they can’t believe that it’s real. And that is kind of what I’m going for in my work – taking things as they are, and presenting images and video not manipulated in the camera but manipulated in the real world with lights and optics. 

Tell us about what other arts disciplines you work in. What are you currently working on?

I do work in music, some writing, film scoring, and videography. I am finishing a recording this month with my band, The Hearts. We are working on finishing our fifth album. We’re playing a show on November 18^th with Rosina Cove at Soho on Jasper Ave. That’ll be our first time playing after we wrap up recording on this new record.

I have exhibits coming up next year at the Art Gallery of Alberta (a giant 50-foot mural that will be installed in the main hall of the AGA) from March-July 2024, and a solo exhibit at the Art Gallery of St Albert from October-November 2024.

Also, with a writing partner I have an animated science fiction television pilot script that has won some awards and gotten some pretty favorable coverage. My partner and I are trying to move into a production phase this year and next year, and that will be pretty terrifying and exciting.

You’ve mentioned that you’re interested in furthering your practice to pursue more public art opportunities. What is it about public art that you’re drawn to?

The thing about public art that really appeals to me is that it can make for some really magical experiences; ones that you didn’t expect, ones that are immersive that can really shift your perspective. And good public art is a destination that can help define the personality of a place. I’m drawn to the long-term legacy aspect of it as well. It’s like leaving a graffiti tag on a wall, but it’s a graffiti tag that weighs 10,000 pounds and is made out of metal and glass. Good public art is about the space as much as it is about the art. It should be a piece that works with the land, works with the environment, works with the community, and enhances their experience of that space. I think really good public art can become a destination. If you Google image search Chicago, I’m sure one of the first two images that will show up will be the Bean. People forget it is just a piece of public art that was commissioned and plopped down in the middle of a plaza. That’s the kind of stuff that I really want to work on – that land-based destination immersive experiences.

For me, wanting to move into public art is a way of paying forward some of the early formative experiences with art and artists and exhibits that led me on my path. I think about some of those early experiences that really changed the way that I thought about how a life could be lived, and planted the seeds of a new perspective in my mind that grew over the years and really put me on the path to being a full-time artist. In public art I want to make stuff that will blow the mind of some weird kid like I was and show them that being a weirdo is not only OK, but it’s where it’s at. I want to help plant those seeds of lifelong creativity and curiosity.

This year we’re celebrating 25 years of the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund. As a two-time recipient (2016 and 2021), how has this award impacted your career as an artist in Edmonton?

Receiving the Edmonton Artist Trust Fund Award was really helpful to my career. The first time that I received it in 2016, it gave me the time that I needed to work on some film and TV projects. I was able to take time away from my job as a photographer and worked on some projects that I wouldn’t have had the time for. I learned a lot in those projects about film scoring and video production, and those are skills that I’ve brought forward into my current work. When I received the award the second time in 2021, it really helped me transition to a career as a full-time artist. That was when I was leaving my career as a photographer to become a full-time conceptual artist. It really came at a crucial time where it gave me a little bit of the support that I needed to be able to make that transition.

About Dwayne Martineau

Dwayne Martineau is a visual artist, photographer, musician and writer based in Edmonton. In his work, he flips the gaze of the traditional landscape to let nature stare back at us. His goal is to crack open colonial perspectives and encourage a more holistic and connected worldview. Dwayne is the Winner of the 2022 Eldon + Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize; recipient of the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund award in 2016 and 2021; and has been featured in the Canadian Geographic magazine article ​“5 Artists Addressing Canada’s Increasingly Threatened Landscapes,” July/​August 2022.