Provenance

Acquired directly from the artist

Private Collection, Vancouver

Big city towers and coloured lights downtown is one of Yuxweluptun’s most significant sculptural ovoid works. In this artwork, ovoid forms serve as the central element. Ovoids are the foundational building blocks of classic Northwest Coast Indigenous design and are unique in Yuxweluptun’s work as they are used as non-pictorial compositions to convey critical issues of the human plight such as self-determination, self-government, social conditions and Indigenous philosophy. In Big city towers and coloured lights downtown, the ovoid represents an Aboriginal person’s sense of identity, as well as his or her cultural background. Different colours of ovoids represent the frustration, struggles, and confusion of one’s identity that occurred in the minds of the Aboriginal people throughout the colonization of Canada.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is one of the most prominent outspoken contemporary First Nations artists working today and is projected to be one of the most relevant of our time. Yuxweluptun, graduated from the Emily Carr School of Art and Design in 1983 with an honours degree. His strategy is to document and promote change in contemporary Indigenous history through paintings and sculpture, using Coast Salish cosmology, Northwest Coast formal design elements, and the Western landscape tradition. Yuxweluptun’s works explore political, environmental, and cultural issues. His personal and socio-political experiences enhance this practice of documentation. Major exhibitions of the artist’s work have taken place at the Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada; the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, USA; The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, USA; The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada.