Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

With over fifty drawings extending over three decades, this exhibition is the first to survey Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s works on paper. Described by Yuxweluptun as preliminary studies, these drawings, etchings and watercolours are the background work and the measuring-stick for developing the forms and ideas that have come to identify his style and pictorial inventiveness. The drawings include the most recent totemic tree studies (2004–2009), the hybrid ovoid portraits (2002–2005), figurative drawings (1985–2009) (some of which are studies for paintings), watercolours (1980–1993), and etchings (1993–2009).

Yuxweluptun refers to his work as a discourse. In his work, art and politics intermix with a Salish cosmology to critique and transform the conditions arising from colonial displacement, returning the notion of an empty newly discovered land to an Indigenous sense of place. In this way a cultural landscape becomes known, if not fully understood, through the myriad forms that are central to Yuxweluptun’s image making. While his work often lays out the terms of a grim pedagogy addressing racism and abuse of the land, Yuxweluptun explores these ideas with a liberating and playful humour.

The traditional and hybrid visual shapes that characterize these complex drawings have provided the forms and ideas for internationally recognized paintings, which have forged far ahead in their ability to challenge the powers of wide networks of environmental, social, political, and legal relationships that, since colonial settlement, have pervaded the lives of Indigenous peoples on the Northwest coast of British Columbia. When characterized as drawing in colonial space, the artist’s discursive position combines compositional elements of Northwest Coast art with the abstractions of modernism. His work is often identified as extracting from the fluid shapes of Surrealism — from Salvador Dali to Roberto Matta, but the surrealists took inspiration from their own interpretation of a Native consciousness by contrasting this to a lack of connection between art and society so characteristic of modernity. The drawings of Yuxweluptun demonstrate a strategic sensibility to underscore how history is embedded in place: these works reinscribe an Indigenous visibility to a homeland, or the difference marking out the Indigenous occupants of invaded colonies, which is in contrast to a neo-colonial gaze. As counterpoint the drawings depict a cultural landscape within which representation and meaning open up hidden epistemologies and indigenous peoples walk on the land. 

Guest Curated by Petra Watson


### Biography

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is best known for his large scale painting, which he has exhibited nationally and internationally since graduating from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 1983. Solo exhibitions include *Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Colour Zone*, Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2001) and *Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservation*, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (1995). Recent group exhibitions include *Challenging Traditions*, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinberg, Ontario (2009); *Transporters: Contemporary Salish Art*, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2008); and *Beyond Beads and Feathers: Recent Work by Six Contemporary Native American Artists*, Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2002).



A black and white portrait. The portrait depicts a figure from the shoulders up with a human-like torso and a stylized, mask-like head resembling an animal.

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Eight framed works on paper mounted on three gallery walls. A glass vitrine table sits at the center of the room. Within the vitrine, books and more works on paper are displayed.

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Seven framed works on paper, of various scales, hang on a gallery wall. In tall, narrow compositions, five of the artworks depict evergreen trees in black and white.

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Seven framed works on paper mounted on a gallery wall. Three artworks hang on the left side of a corner wall and four on the right. The artworks depict various renderings of trees and human figures.

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Eight framed works on paper mounted on two gallery walls. Five on the left side of a corner wall and three on the right, varying in scale. The artworks depict outdoor settings and trees.

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Neo-Native Drawings and Other Works

*PORTRAIT* is the third and final in a series of three publications that uses the petit genres of landscape, still life and portraiture to reflect programming at the Contemporary Art Gallery which framed tendencies in contemporary art.


Published by the Contemporary Art Gallery in 2010, this catalogue includes texts by curator Glenn Alteen, film theorist Lisa Coulthard, art historian Gill Perry and cultural theorist Helma Sawatzky as well as a text by CAG curator Jenifer Papararo and an interview with artist Elizabeth Zvonar. The publication includes the CAG exhibitions, *Playing Homage*, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: *Neo-Native Drawings and Other Works*, Elizabeth Zvonar: *On Time* and *Face Up*.

#### Other publications from this series:

*LANDSCAPE*

*STILL LIFE*

Purchase all three publications for $25 below.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Exhibitions

Publications & Editions