Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun: Floor Opener
June 14 to 5 October 2025
With writing by Peter Morin
Curated by Darryn Doull
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun is one of Canada’s most outspoken and influential contemporary artists, confronting colonialist suppression, environmental degradation, and the ongoing struggles for Indigenous sovereignty. Of Cowichan (Hul’q’umi’num Coast Salish) and Okanagan (Syilx) descent, he presents his ideas through hard-hitting, polemical, but also playful artworks that now span a forty-year career. Yuxweluptuns’ works can be brutal critiques of issues such as land title, residential schools, and the destruction of the environment, making him a pivotal voice in contemporary art.
Remarkably, this is the first solo exhibition in Ontario for the seminal artist. This, in part, signals an underlying rationale for the project: despite its significance, message, and centrality to any imagination of the contemporary milieu of the lands now collectively referred to as Canada, the work is not commonly seen in this part of the world. His unflinching capacity to survey the present political and social moment and inflect upon it his lived experiences brings a clairvoyantly spiritual resonance. While rooted in traditional iconography and form, the issues that Yuxweluptun articulates are inextricably woven into our collective present moment.
About the Artist
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun lives and works on unceded, traditional and ancestral xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories. An artist of Coast Salish and Okanagan descent, he graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in British Columbia. 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; his work is replete with masked fish farmers, super-predator oil barons, abstracted ovoids and unforgettable depictions of a spirit-filled, but now toxic, natural world.
Highly respected locally, Yuxweluptun’s work has also been displayed in numerous international group and solo exhibitions, including the seminal INDIGENA: Contemporary Native Perspectives (1992) at the Canadian Museum of History (then the Canadian Museum of Civilization) and in Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art (2013) at the National Gallery of Canada. In 1998, Yuxweluptun was the recipient of the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts (VIVA) Award. He was also honoured in 2013 with a prestigious Fellowship at the Eitelijorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. Other major projects include the 30-year survey Unceded Territories at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, which also produced a full-colour publication and commissioned texts.
With support from Macaulay + Co. Fine Art
Image credits:
Header: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, Untitled, 2025. Acrylic on canvas. 96 x 72 in. Courtesy of Macaulay + Co. and the artist, photo: Byron
Dauncey
Feature image: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, Rainy Cowichan winter Ceremony in the Longhouse, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 92 x 76 in. Courtesy of Macaulay + Co. and the artist, photo: Byron Dauncey.
Above: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun in front of his work Fire Path, 2024, Image credit: Courtesy of Macaulay + Co., photo: Byron Dauncey
Calendar image: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, Rainy Cowichan winter Ceremony in the Longhouse (detail 3), 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 92 x 76 in. Courtesy of Macaulay + Co. and the artist, photo: Byron Dauncey.
