You’re in it now by Dwayne Martineau
Dwayne Martineau
You’re in it now
Site #1
Churchill Square
11:00am-9:30pm
Surreal images of spruce bark and balsam poplar create a doorway into the woods. After stepping through, we realize this may be a stickier situation than expected. You’re in it now presents images that are real and unaltered photographs, where the artist uses optical tools to bend and reflect light—creating new perspectives on nature.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Nature is put on the pedestal. We are the outsiders. ”
My work is a devotion to two areas of study— nature, and the physicality of light.
My goal is to flip the gaze of the traditional landscape and let nature stare back at us.
Through photography, video, installation, and sound, I try to crack open perspectives and test the viewer’s relationship with nature, encouraging a more thoughtful and connected worldview.
My work starts with adventures in Alberta's forests and lakes. Most often featured are the common and familiar, the nooks and crannies. The things we tend to step on.
Images are created in-camera, in real life, with real light. I use glass, metal, water, and found objects to manipulate light and create surreal yet familiar landscapes. Symmetries reveal the hidden consciousness of the woods.
Nature is put on the pedestal. We are the outsiders.
I’m on a mission to decolonize landscape art and encourage a new movement of contemporary Indigenous landscape artists.
I also want to pay forward my own early formative experiences with art. I want to blow the mind of a weird misfit kid like I was and nudge them toward a life of curiosity and exploration.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Dwayne Martineau is a visual artist, photographer, musician, writer, and educator based in Edmonton.
Bringing together his background in photography and music, Martineau constructs experimental multimedia works and immersive installations that test our relationship with nature.
In 2022, Dwayne won the Eldon + Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize for his work STRANGE JURY, featured at the Art Gallery of Alberta. He received the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Award in 2016 and 2021, and was featured in the summer 2022 issue of Canadian Geographic magazine’s 5 Artists Addressing Canada's Increasingly Threatened Landscapes, alongside Christi Belcourt, Edward Burtynsky and Gavin Lynch. In 2024, his 15-metre-wide mural “Boreal Fortress” transformed the Art Gallery of Alberta’s Main Hall into a kaleidoscopic landscape for six months, leading up to the gallery’s centenary.