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LEVI NELSON

Levi Nelson is an artist from the Lil’wat Nation in Mount Currie, British Columbia. He recently received his undergraduate degree from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, with a focus on the Visual Arts. He was selected to partake in the Audain Art Museum’s Emerging Artist Program presented by RBC in 2019. Nelson has received the John C. Kerr Chancellor Emeritus Award for Excellence in Visual Arts (2021) and the IDEA Art Award (2018). His work is held in the Audain Art Museum Collection and the VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation Art Collection. Nelson now resides in New York City where he is working towards his Masters of Fine Arts at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Nelson’s work can best be described as contemporary First Nations art, in which he fuses elements and ideas concerning Indigeneity with pop culture imagery through the traditional Western practice of oil painting, in addition to mixed media; integrating silkscreen, paint, and collage on canvas. Nelson’s Sliced series marks a turn toward a focus on shape and colour. His composition is broken into several fragments running vertically across the canvas. Each uneven stripe feels like a piece of a larger composition that has been torn away and combined to create this larger work. The viewer can identify various forms, such as eyes, that have been ‘sliced’ in order to create this energetic combination of shape and colour. The white stripe still present acts as a split in the composition and serves to emphasize the vibrancy of the surrounding hues.

Mappe Monde (Synapses)

2022, oil on linen

On verso signed and dated 36 x 48 in, 91.4 x 121.9 cm

Value $20,000

Donated by the Artist, courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery

Lot #02

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