indigenouscontemporaryart:

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun | Portrait of a Residential School Child. 2005

Yuxweluptun’s strategy is to document and promote change in contemporary Indigenous history using Coast Salish cosmology, Northwest Coast formal design elements, and the Western landscape tradition. His painted works explore political, environmental, and cultural issues. His personal and socio-political experiences enhance this practice of documentation.

Yuxweluptun style has often been likened to surrealism but he prefers to call it “visionism”. “The symbolic forms are interchangeable, based on my needs when I make a painting,” he says in his artist’s statement. “The symbolism transforms into landscape and other forms to create a vision.”