LAWRENCE PAUL YUXWELUPTUN LETS’LO:TSELTUN: Neo-Savage Landscapes
September 18 – Nov 1, 2025
Opening: September 18, 2025 3-7pm
Macaulay + co is thrilled to present a solo exhibition of work by Vancouver-based artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun. New landscape paintings present Yuxweluptun’s singular fearless voice, collapsing concepts around history, memory, and place. Yuxweluptun has said “My work is to record” and holds up a strange mirror challenging the eye of the dominant culture, and casting a new light on the genre. This exhibition inaugurates our new gallery space on West 10th Avenue.
Also on view are selections from a new body of work, Heavy Metal Ovoids. Yuxwelutpun uses new materials and techniques to bring fresh elements forward to this ongoing body of work. The metallic Ovoids float above a painted plane, bringing a sense of Native Futurism centring Indigenous knowledge, culture, and perspectives in a futuristic context, subverting colonial narratives and highlighting concepts of Indigenous sovereignty, justice, and joy. An expression of free thought, Yuxweluptun’s Ovoidism dates back to the 1980’s. In 2003, Yuxweluptun wrote the Ovoid Manifesto as follows:
THE MANIFESTO OF OVOIDISM
This new body of work develops and creates a new visual language of conceptual art. The principal pinnacle concept is the ovoid. I have spent years looking at different ovoids, hundreds of them, thinking about them and visualizing different ovoids to create art. The rule of ovoidism is to maintain some part of, or all of, the shape of the ovoid. At the same time, 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 have to be synthesized together. I am simplifying a way to discuss my mind and how I feel. This body of work is a new way for me to express Native “modernalities” and to intellectualize place, space and Native reason.
I am engaged in recording myself and the noble savage in the modernalities of this time and history. Fundamentally, it is about colonial deconstruction and Aboriginal reconstruction.
– Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun
NOTES
1. Modernalities is a neologism that references the art historical juncture of modernism and primitivism as politically contested and historically unfinished.
