[1][2] His paintings employ elements of Northwest Coast formline design and Surrealism to explore issues as environmentalism, land ownership, and Canada's treatment of First Nations peoples.
Initially encouraged to pursue a career in politics, instead it is Yuxweluptun's paintings, drawings, and assemblages that give voice to concerns regarding land claims, damaging assimilationist policies, and environmental degradation.
[6] Yuxweluptun attended the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (now University) in the late 1970s and early 1980s and graduated in 1983 with an honours degree in painting.
[12] Many of his pieces show elements of Surrealism as a process of "truth-telling and healing,"[13] including similarities to the painted melting objects of Spanish artist, Salvador Dalí.
[15] Yuxweluptun is among the most overtly critical artists practicing in Canada today; he doesn't shy away from depicting the devastating realities that face many Native people and does so through a unique hybridization of Northwest Coast aesthetics—ovoids and stylized formlines—with the dream-like aesthetics of Surrealism.
Yuxweluptun's wry appropriation of Surrealism is a reminder of the formative influence of Aboriginal artifacts, including Northwest coast masks, on this movement.
[18] Although the ovoid is used in Coast Salish art, formlines which are identifiably Haida and Kwakwaka'wakw also figure prominently in the artist's paintings and drawings.
The harsh “toxicological” realities shown in Yuxweluptun's paintings—forests ravaged by clear cuts, water filled with toxic pollution, the figures of bureaucracy (Native and non-Native alike), the abject poverty and abuse on Vancouver's downtown east side—are allegorical and rendered like stunning nightmares with smouldering technicolour palettes that are hard to overlook.
As curator Scott Watson observes, his works invert the subservient role of Native arts and crafts within the development of Canadian Modernism.
[21] The work's components included Macintosh and PC computers, a sampler, spatialized sound, custom-made controls and stereoscopic display.
This exhibition, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservations, remains the artist's first and only career survey to date and served to underscore the importance of his work within the Canadian landscape painting tradition for its role in actively challenging many of the genre's conventions.
Curated by Candice Hopkins and Mark Soo, the exhibition consisted of a single painting, Guardian Spirits on the Land: Ceremony of Sovereignty (2000) alongside a selection of pulp science fiction novels.
The exhibition was held in conjunction with a series of talks by writers that explore Yuxweluptun's work in relation to the genre of science fiction.
[39][36] Other exhibitions include globally and in Canada, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Time Immemorial (You're Just Mad Because We Got Here First), Galerie Canada Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2017; Colour Zone, Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2009; An Indian Act: Shooting the Indian Act, Locus+, Newcastle, UK, 1997; Inherent Rights, Vision Rights: Virtual Reality Paintings and Drawings, Canadian Embassy, Paris, 1993; True North: The Landscape Tradition in Contemporary Canadian Art, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan; New Territories: 350/500 Years After, Montreal, Quebec (touring); In the Shadow of the Sun, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec, 1988; and The Warehouse Show, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1983.