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Artspeak,

Artspeak

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including galleries and museums in Taiwan, United States, France, and Switzerland. Much of the content of his work is derived from contemporary Native social and political issues, using Coast Salish cosmology, Northwest Coast formal design elements and the Western landscape tradition. He received his degree from Emily Carr School of Art and Design in 1983

Exhibitions

  • Barn Swallows

    CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STROTHER, LAWRENCE PAUL YUXWELUPTUN
    February 8–March 29, 2014

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STRArtspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Artspeak - “Barn Swallows” - CAROLINE MONNET, DEVIN TROY STR

    Barn Swallows brings together three artists whose works combine the vocabulary of popular and traditional visual-cultures with the tropes of modernist abstraction to create unique hybrids forms. Each artist uses this strategy for a different purpose, as the basis for formalist exploration, to consider representation’s role in the political tensions of modernity, or to reflect on the power dynamics at play in the portrayal of race and gender in art history and popular culture.

    Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s recent ovoid paintings and sculptures complement his more familiar figurative tableaux of the past thirty years. While the idealized Northwest-Coast formline shapes are freed from their traditional depictive role, the titles nonetheless root these works in the artist’s broader concern with representation, the landscape and First Nations political struggles.

    By contrast, Caroline Monnet’s Anomalia collage and silkscreen series approaches abstraction by splicing together found images of urban development, resource extraction and Hollywood depictions of First Nations culture, dissolving the originals into a fragmentary field of overlapping facets. These fields are, in turn, cropped into the shapes of silhouettes of animal and human figures—each image in the series offering a different view on the collision of nature and culture in recent history.

    Devin Troy Strother’s high-relief assemblages and paintings centre around caricatures of black figures in sometimes gory, sexualized scenes on top of abstract backgrounds, which poke fun at the pretensions of formalism. Sardonic titles like A Black Joan Jonas in “Nigga I’m a Coyote” highlight the entangled histories of primitivism and abstraction within avant-garde art, asking, in the process, who has the right to use certain kinds of language and certain kinds of history.

    Postscript 56: Denise Ryner on Barn Swallows (PDF)

Talks & Events

  • Talk

    LAWRENCE PAUL YUXWELUPTUN
    November 3, 1991

    Writers/Artists/Talks, a joint project of the Kootenay School of Writing and Artspeak Gallery, consists of a series of public talks and exhibitions by writers and artists with the intention to articulate a common theoretical and practical ground for the two disciplines.