Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun / Sculptures and Paintings

February 4th – March 25th, 2023

We are thrilled to present new works by Lawrence Paul Yuweluptun exhibited publicly for the first time. The paintings and sculptures on view are a critical and impassioned melding of modernism, history, and Indigenous perspectives that records what the artist feels are the major issues facing Indigenous people today. Influential as both artist and activist, Yuxweluptun merges traditional iconography with representations of the environment and the history of colonization, resulting in his powerful, contemporary imagery.

On view are landscape and Ovoid paintings, alongside figurative Ovoid sculptures.This latter work creates a new visual language of conceptual art. The principal pinnacle concept is the Ovoid*. In this context the Ovoid is first liberated from the rules of Northwest Coast Design in the paintings, and then rebuilt again into figures. The Ovoid serves as a philosophy to think about such things as land claims, Aboriginal rights, self-determination and self-government, social conditions and environmentalism, Native reason and Native philosophy – all of these things synthesized together. Fundamentally, it is about colonial deconstruction and Aboriginal reconstruction.