BLACKENED FRAME

October 10 - 23

Opening Reception : October 16

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas has spent much of his career challenging the boundaries through which Northwest Coast art is understood. Born in Prince Rupert in 1954 and raised in Haida Gwaii, he is a descendant of artists including Isabella Edenshaw, Charles Edenshaw, and Delores Churchill, and developed his practice in close relationship with the artists of Haida Gwaii. From this foundation, Yahgulanaas developed what he calls Haida Manga, a visual language that brings the structural principles of northern formline into conversation with Japanese manga, Asian brush traditions, comics, abstraction, popular culture, and contemporary storytelling. Rather than treating categories such as traditional and contemporary, or fine art and popular image, as fixed oppositions, he allows them to remain fluid and continually open to reinterpretation.

**TICKLED BY KELP -**38 X 52 INCHES - ACRYLIC ON CANVAS - 2026 - *Inquire for Pricing*

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Overboard
12.2 x 9
Watercolour
SOLD

Snappers
12.2 x 8.2
Watercolour and Graphite
Inquire for Pricing

In Blackened Frame, thick black lines move through faces, hands, animals, and fragments of the body, sometimes defining a form and elsewhere dissolving into borders, pathways, or negative spaces. In works such as Tickled by Kelp, Surfing, Plunge, and Erosion, these lines carry the eye through softer fields of cream, pale blue, yellow, and pink, allowing the images to shift between figuration and abstraction. That sense of movement continues in the watercolours, where figures, waves, and fishing imagery overlap and drift into one another. Humour runs through the work as well, appearing in exaggerated bodies, unexpected situations, and titles including Tickled by Kelp and Clam Up reinforce this sense of play. The humour provides a way of approaching complexity. This tension between playfulness and seriousness has long distinguished Yahgulanaas’ practice. His work does not insist that the viewer choose between them.

Gotit - 31.75 x 55 Inches - Copper Leaf, Acrylic - *Inquire for Pricing*

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Hippoglossus Hagu
12.2 x 9
Watercolour and Ink
Inquire for Pricing

Clam Up
14.5 x 11
Watercolour and Graphite
SOLD

The exhibition also includes two works from Yahgulanaas’ Coppers from the Hood series, in which Toyota Yaris hoods are transformed with copper leaf and paint. Their curved profiles recall Haida dugout canoes, bringing handmade and manufactured forms of transportation into direct visual conversation. Copper introduces another layer of cultural reference, historically, Haida Coppers were shield-like objects associated with wealth, power, and prestige, allowing Yahgulanaas to turn the automobile hood into both material transformation and visual pun. Held in major collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, Seattle Art Museum, and the Vancouver Art Gallery, Yahgulanaas’ work continues to bring Haida visual language into an expansive international contemporary context.