On Now: Flesh Tones
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
Summer/Fall 2025
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1265 Howe St, Vancouver BC
Vancouver BC — Malaspina Printmakers is pleased to present a new exhibition by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas at 1265 Howe St, Vancouver, BC for Summer/Fall 2025.
Flesh Tones is an ongoing series of anthropomorphic studies by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, which began around 2008. The name Flesh Tones alludes both to colour and to corporeality; the series was inspired by Yahgulanaas’ observation of copper leaf, resembling the creases and translucent glow of the human form.
The series explores human-like shapes that emerge as gestural and alive. Quick brush strokes amidst pools of colour urgently call for less brain and more dance. Yahgulanaas’ emphasis on spontaneity results in what anthropologist and curator Nicola Levell has called a kind of ‘visual jazz.’ Flesh Tones are not fixed compositions, but energetic improvisations where line, colour, and contour create a dynamic play of movement. The artistic process becomes a kind of kinaesthetic thinking, improvisational in nature and rhythmic in execution, responding to the immediate conditions of mark-making. Recently, Yahgulanaas is developing a new branch of Flesh Tones in black and white. These works shift the focus to linework and spatial rhythm, drawing attention to the curves and folds of skin and limb.
Flesh Tones is in conceptual conversation with the Daalkaatlii Diaries series, paintings of which are now held in the Musée du quai Branly in Paris and notable private collections. While the palette differs between these bodies of work, they both invite viewers to interpret ambiguous, living shapes that hover between figuration and abstraction.
Significantly, Flesh Tones contrasts with Yahgulanaas’s large-scale narrative murals, such as the recent Clan Hat commission for the Vancouver Art Gallery (2025). The murals, which can take years to create, are guided by overarching visual matrices. Where mural works engage with structured storytelling, Flesh Tones embraces unpredictability, resisting linearity and offering instead what might be described as an anti-structural poetics of the body. These works disrupt the visual architecture of contemporary life, or the grid of urban design.
Yahgulanaas asks, “How do you dance in a square room?”
Installation of FLESH TONES at Malaspina Printmakers in Vancouver, B.C.