Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Leaving My Reservation to Go to Ottawa and Fight for a New Constitution

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0:00:06.8 Julia Mun: We’re in the Art Bridges storage. We’re looking at a massive painting titled Leaving My Reservation to Go to Ottawa and Fight for a New Constitution by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, who is a First Nations artist from Canada, of Coast Salish and Okanagan descent.

0:00:23.4 Beth Harris: I think the size of this painting speaks to the artist’s seriousness and his ambition.

0:00:29.9 Julia Mun: He describes himself as a history painter. He attended the Emily Carr School of Art and Design, where he became very familiar with modernism, primitivism, Surrealism, and where he ultimately learned to essentially subvert those movements.

0:00:46.8 Beth Harris: We have this vast empty landscape that reminds me of the landscapes of Dalí with some odd shapes in the middle ground. Then these very realistic or almost cartoonish forms like the clouds and the rainbow and this large figure carrying a briefcase, who is emaciated but also intent on moving forward.

0:01:11.2 Julia Mun: A lot of the landscape and even the figure himself is created out of imagery from Coast Salish carvings in masks and totems. Yuxweluptun is embedding the ovoid back into the land and back into Indigenous bodies. He created the Manifesto of Ovoidism, which was his way of creating a framework where Indigenous artists could look back into their visual language and create a modernity out of it. So many modern movements are tied with colonialism, for example, primitivism. So much of it was based on Northwest Coast masks and totems and appropriated into this Euro American movement. And so he’s essentially not only taking that visual language back, but also taking back the harmful effects of colonialism. Yuxweluptun grew up in a very politically conscious family. His parents were both involved in political organizations. And as a child he was forced to attend the Kamloops Indian Residential School and was able to attend public school when he was around 7 to 8 years old. And so politics and the effects of colonialism have constantly been at the forefront of his work.

0:02:29.1 Beth Harris: He talks a lot about the pain of the colonial experience, of being robbed of one’s language, of one’s culture, and sees his art as a way to reclaim that culture. And it’s difficult to look at. The figure is red, emaciated, elongated. The form line, the ovoids that make up his head, the skull, are emptied.

0:02:56.0 Julia Mun: It seems like he’s coming from this prismatic bridge that’s connecting the foreground with the background. The bridge has rectangular sections. They appear like filing cabinets.

0:03:07.8 Beth Harris: I think having to follow those legal strictures that essentially made him a second-class citizen within Canada. We can see that embodied in that briefcase that looks so official and actually about the same size as one of those slots. As though nothing escapes the long arm of the Canadian government and the legislation around First Nations.

0:03:31.8 Julia Mun: The year of this painting is 1985. In this same year, the Bill C-31 was passed as an amendment to the original Indian Act of 1876. This bill was meant to address gender discrimination of the Indian Act, which forced Indian women who marry non Indian men to lose their status. And if they had children, those children would lose their status as well. But the bill restored Indian status to those previously impacted and allowed First Nations peoples to actually control their own membership and therefore become closer to self governance.

0:04:08.0 Beth Harris: So we have these warm yellows and oranges and these lovely cooler colors of the blue of the clear sky, the greens of the hills. But like the figure itself, that landscape is partial. It’s there, but also has had parts removed and is present, but empty in a way at the same time. I wonder if that’s a metaphor for some of his political views.

0:04:36.1 Julia Mun: So the hollow aspects of the land in the background seem reminiscent of the material capitalization that comes with colonialism.

0:04:45.4 Beth Harris: You have a sense that resources have literally been extracted from the land, which has been left hollow in places. As we look into the background behind those hills, we see rather stylized clouds. It looks like a storm is passing. And we see a rainbow emerging.

0:05:02.6 Julia Mun: Yuxweluptun calls these sovereign rainbows. They’re representations of how Aboriginal and First Nations rights are inseparable from the land and spirit and power. So they’re constantly present throughout his work. Rainbows are also refractions of light. And so in the same vein, Yuxweluptun is also refracting our own perceptions about the legacies of colonialism.

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This work at Art Bridges

The artist’s website

Karen Duffek and Tania Willard, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories (Vancouver: Figure 1 Publishing, 2016).

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, “Interview,” by Ammiel Alcalay, BOMB Magazine, no. 136 (Summer 2016).

Contemporary art, an introduction

Terms and issues in Native American art