Dwayne Martineau’s exhibit One Dead Tree is in the Community Gallery for this week’s installment of our summer Incubator series! Check out our video interview with Dwayne and remember he’ll be doing a special artist talk at tonight’s patio at 7:30 PM.

Dwayne Martineau is a visual artist, photographer, and musician living in the tiny woods of Mill Creek; sometimes inside a camera obscura. He plays music in a red shirt with the band Jeff Stuart and The Hearts. Dwayne is happiest beside a dog, in a canoe, behind a Hawaiian steel guitar, or in an aspen grove. He dislikes quicksand, and loves his parents.

ONE DEAD TREE is one branch of a life-long series of experimental landscape photography.

My focus is on the familiar and the humble: trees, weeds, bugs, seeds, detritus. By playing with glass, water, film, time, perspective, and scale, I try to create straight-out-of-camera real-light images that reveal the magic of the material world.

Trees have presented a particular challenge for me. I’ve spent years, and thousands of frames of film and pixels, trying to understand them and express what they mean to me. They are half-hidden and ancient; fragile and indestructible; friends and monsters.

I use various methods to introduce symmetries into my photographs. By creating symmetry, an animistic response is triggered. We recognize the familiar bilateral pattern of humans and animals, and we ascribe a soul— an intent— to inanimate objects.

For this project, I started with two large-format black-and-white film negatives— two different photos of one dead tree. I stacked the negatives in a homemade light box, and used a digital macro lens to explore the scene until symmetries and stories emerged.

Since these are constructed symmetries, this process is one of discovery and self-projection. At the time, my perception was being filtered by intense feelings about the imminent death of a close friend. Where I would normally seek majesty, I was finding fear, decay, and confused beauty.