Less brain and more dance: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas activates downtown window gallery with playful figures in new kinetic art installation
Press release fom Malaspina Printmakers
On Now: Flesh Tones
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
Summer/Fall 2025
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?”
Additional Information
Exhibition is on display 24/7 in the windows at 1265 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada
In addition to Flesh Tones at Malaspina Printmakers, work from Yahgulanaas' series Daalkaatlii Diaries will be exhibited at Gallery Jones this September, 2025.
Acknowledgements
Malaspina Printmakers would like to give special thanks to Michael Vandermeer & Cheryl Hamilton of ie creative, Val Loewen, Ben Duncan, Justin Muir, and MOCA Toronto for their support in the production of the work. Thank you to our funders including the Audain Foundation, City of Vancouver, BC Arts Council, Province of British Columbia, and Canada Council for the Arts for their ongoing support of our exhibition programming.
How does this feel throwing this on the end? It felt awkward to integrate it into the paragraph above where the series is mentioned in my opinion
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