Meandered
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, March - May 2024
For his solo exhibition at MCA Denver, Steven J. Yazzie (Diné/Laguna Pueblo) presents recent painting, drawing, sculpture, and video works that reflect on his shifting perception of and relationship with the landscape. Yazzie is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, video/film, and community collaborations. His work explores the complexities of an Indigenous experience as it relates to personal identity, community relationships, and the essential connection to the land as the source of life, stories, conflict, and healing.
Yazzie’s work often draws inspiration from personal memories and immersive experiences revisiting sites in the northern region of the Navajo reservation (Dinétah) in Arizona and New Mexico, where the artist grew up, or recently, traversing locations in Colorado, where he resides. Yazzie likens his recent practice to meandering fieldwork, where he begins his artistic research in the natural environment, allowing days-long trips into rural areas to intuitively inform how his multimedia works will unfold and take shape. The exhibition’s title, Meandered is both a metaphor for Yazzie’s artistic process, and a framework for exploring the organic patterns or phenomenon in nature.
From energetic, colorful landscape paintings, and a sculpture made from a fallen tree trunk to drawings made while operating a recumbent bicycle, the collection of works on view convey a sense of motion and progression of time indicative of many contemporary interactions between humans and nature. Natural landscapes are often taken in from the window of a moving vehicle, mediated by technology, viewed from our phone or computer screens, or conjured from distant or secondhand memories. Deconstructing romanticized notions of nature, Yazzie’s work invite viewers to contemplate the dynamic relationship between humanity and the environment, highlighting the ways in which our perceptions of nature are shaped by modern technologies and the passage of time.
