Gerald Peters Contemporary is pleased to present What Water Remembers, a new exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Steven J. Yazzie. Interested in exploring the convergence of land, water, and cultural memory, the exhibition draws upon the artist’s personal history and immersive experiences in the desert southwest.

Included in the exhibition will be two new abstract landscapes and a single digital composite photograph accompanied by a suite of watercolors from the artist’s newest series, Drifting & Painting: San Juan River. Created en plein air while Yazzie floated down the San Juan River through the Goosenecks and Glen Canyon Recreation Area, Utah, the series of twelve watercolors and corresponding film debut with the exhibition.

This stretch of the San Juan river flows through politically and spiritually charged geography. Here the river divides the Navajo Reservation and public federal lands, weaving through locations marked with historical tension and natural beauty. Yazzie’s process of drifting while painting merges movement with mark-making, allowing the water’s rhythm to influence form, gesture, and palette. The resulting works are contemplative meditations on presence, mobility, and the stories landscapes carry.

Through abstraction and site-responsive practice, What Water Remembers invites viewers to consider the layered histories embedded in the land and ask: what does the river hold, and what does it release?