David Martineau Lachance

Ode to Sleepy Hearts
09.10–10.10.2020
Room 2

As a child of the suburbs and a night owl, David Martineau Lachance is interested in parallel histories, the unusual, masquerades, and the occult. A versatile artist, he designs and produces nearly every element in his projects, from costumes to performances, camerawork, editing, and music. The video he is presenting at CLARK, titled Ode to Sleepy Hearts (2018), was a call for light during a particularly dark moment. Like a music video, it is the image that accompanies the music; a visual poem in three verses that floats through the gallery.

Red-Wigglers, Night-Crawlers

& Other Worms

look out

into the crapulous moonlight:

figures of women cascading through the Sunday night;

no beer in sight.

The video is inspired by the work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972), an American optician and self-taught photographer. Known for his ghostly figures and masked characters, his backlit images and abandoned farm settings, Meatyard was part of an art community in Lexington, Kentucky, far from the major art centres of the day. A portrait of Meatyard by the poet, publisher, and photographer Jonathan Williams (1929-2008) shows him sporting a burgundy polo shirt and lying in a garden of white tulips. Re-performed by Martineau Lachance, the image sets the tone for the video, which is bathed in a palette of unsettling greens and strange pinks.

I remember the Night-blooming

Cereus by Dr. Thornton, Engraver, Blake’s

patron, it

hangs in the hall outside the bedroom

swaying hungrily like these

giant white goddesses of the dark grotto…

Gemini #1 and Belladonna (both from 2018) function as the installation’s footnotes. The first photograph evokes the mythology of birth and of filiation, the notion of the double and of twinship. The second is a reference to a poisonous plant belonging to the potato family, also known as deadly nightshade. Associated to witchcraft, the plant was used by women during the Renaissance to dilate their pupils and make them appear more seductive. It is also thought that Juliet Capulet faked her own death by consuming its berries. Both of Martineau Lachance’s prints were made in the spirit of the photogram, where the light dilutes the object’s physicality.

there are touring cars

and men with large guns

singing through the woods

behind us.1

Ode to Sleepy Hearts’ electroacoustic waltz is both a lullaby and an awakening. An incantation to somnolent beings and alienated extraterrestrials. David Martineau Lachance composes freely, articulates images without meaning to say; an exquisite corpse of the banal, the uncanny, the celestial, the sensitive. The spring of doing.

– Charlotte Lalou Rousseau

1. Jonathan Williams, “The Midnite Show” in Jubilant Thicket: New & Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2005.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54574/the-midnite-show

THANK YOU

The artist would like to offer his warmest thanks to the team at Centre CLARK and Atelier CLARK, and to Roger Lachance, Véronique Martineau, Noémie Weinstein, Simon Chouinard and Charlotte Lalou Rousseau. This video was made possible thanks to the Première Ovation support program from the City of Québec and the government of Québec. Lastly, a special thought goes out to Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who he hopes is still lying amongst the white tulips.