About AFH
This audio is from our virtual studio visit with artist Dwayne Martineau in conversation with aAron Munson, and was originally recorded on August 26, 2021 over Zoom. Video episodes are available on the AFH website.
About the artist
Dwayne Martineau is a visual artist, musician and composer. Two preoccupations dominate his work— the physicality of light, and experimental landscape photography. His work starts from an intimate interaction with nature and a reverence for the complex and sometimes frightening natural world around us that few stop to marvel at. Using optics, mirrors and multiple exposures, Martineau introduces distortions, symmetries, and animism into exhaustive studies of forests and trees. His goal, as he describes it, is to "give us a chance to see nature through a different lens, and understand that it’s got its own thing going on." Dwayne is a member of the Frog Lake First Nation, descended from early French and Scottish settlers, Plains Cree, and Métis.
About the work
I’m a bit hung up on the physicality of light. In my work, I use it as a tool to crack open perspective to explore my identity and connection to the natural world. My process involves probing, poking and prodding, until an a-ha! hits me. Recently, I’ve become very interested in that moment of creation— that singular inspiration, surprise, or insight that pushes someone to create something out of nothing. In visual art, where a piece might take years to complete, how do you bring a viewer closer to that moment of creation? That’s driven me to go big and immersive. I’m trying to move still images into three dimensional space; using structure, scale, motion, and sound to create little worlds that bring a viewer closer to that initial feeling of discovery.
STRANGE JURY is a jury trial by nature in the woods. It is an attempt to recreate a specific moment— it’s dusk in the forest, you enter a clearing... and flinch at the feeling of being watched... 60-foot sentinels living intense and meaningful lives surround you and challenge you... Why are you in our home? What is your relationship to this place? We are not your bathroom.
About the co-host
aAron Munson is a Canadian filmmaker, cinematographer and multimedia artist. His work has taken him from his personal studio to war zones, high-Arctic weather stations, reindeer nomad camps in Siberia, and the Arabian Desert. aAron's projects tackle extreme human experiences, both far from and close to home, utilizing film, video, photography and sound to create visual explorations relating to mental illness, memory, and the nature of consciousness.