Denver-Based Artist Steven J. Yazzie Looks To The Natural World

Steven J. Yazzie paints the edge of ‘Meandered’, the title piece of a recent Museum of Contemporary Art Denver show which will also be included in two upcoming exhibitions.

Steven J. Yazzie has a complex relationship with the land. A member of the Navajo nation and of Laguna Pueblo descent, he spent his youth in the northern region of the Dinétah reservation in Arizona, where uranium mines contaminated residents—including his stepfather—and scarred the earth. Today, the Denver-based multidisciplinary artist uses a variety of mediums to explore his lineage and reconnect with nature.

The title of his recent solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, “Meandered,” encapsulates his approach to art. “A critical part of my process is being immersed in the landscape—hiking, camping, taking photos, wandering,” explains Yazzie. To wit, there’s “Drawing & Driving,” his ongoing series of colored pencil sketches created while lazily cycling a recumbent bike to ponder the question, “How does viewing nature from a moving vehicle speak to modernity and our attempts to capture the world as it’s passing us by?” Then there’s Elders, a massive fallen tree sculpture constructed from assorted branches (pine, aspen, spruce, maple, piñon) that the artist gathered and overlaid with a sound collage of Indigenous elders discussing life cycles, place and community. But painting is Yazzie’s first, and perhaps most important, medium.

'Meandered' is the title piece of a recent Museum of Contemporary Art Denver show which will also be included in two upcoming exhibitions.

'Meandered' is the title piece of a recent Museum of Contemporary Art Denver show which will also be included in two upcoming exhibitions.

A close up of Yazzie's 'Meandered'.

A close up of Yazzie's 'Meandered'.

From his studio in Denver’s Evans School, he draws inspiration from painters like German artist Neo Rauch, whose 2013 work, Das Treffen, is displayed in a book.

From his studio in Denver’s Evans School, he draws inspiration from painters like German artist Neo Rauch, whose 2013 work, Das Treffen, is displayed in a book.

“Meandered” both featured and took its name from a monumental 16-foot triptych that depicts a dreamlike panorama of the vast mountainous Colorado landscape, rendered in a genre Yazzie playfully describes as “hallucinogenic abstraction.” Armed with oil paints in his Evans School studio, he created it while guided by memories rather than photographs. “Starting at the top, I layered in areas—like filling in puzzle pieces—and repeated that process,” explains the artist, adding, “my paintings tend to unfold organically.” The color-saturated world of canyons, rivers, gorges and sunsets feels both immediately identifiable and otherworldly, in part because of Yazzie’s compression of details like horizon lines, perspective or even the time of day. “The trees are all kind of fallen, so while the colors seem full of joy and life, the image itself is a little dark,” he notes. The landscape also shimmies through geological time; it can be read as primordial, post-apocalyptic or as a portmanteau for all manner of Western tropes, from Indian country to manifest destiny to the mythology of the Marlboro man.

This piece is part of a body of Yazzie’s work on view this summer at the Albuquerque Museum and Santa Fe’s Gerald Peters Contemporary. “I want to capture the electricity and vibrancy of our changing world—to really turn up the volume—and put that on canvas,” Yazzie states.

PHOTOS: MATT NAGER