SEATTLE, WA.- Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, born 1984, Ferndale, Washington) layers imagery and poetic prose to create art that foregrounds relationships between communities, landscape, and language. His work intermingles English and Indigenous dialects such as Chinuk Wawa (which Hopinka notes he embarked upon learning in tandem with photography and filmmaking), a revived Chinookan creole of the Pacific Northwest, to consider how language shapes perception of place and acts as a container of culture. This presentation—the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the Northwest— features four recent films and new photographs that focus on personal and political notions of Indigenous homeland.
Growing up in Washington State, far from his ancestral tribal lands in the Midwest and Southwest regions, Hopinka traveled the western powwow circuit with his parents. These foundational experiences of itinerancy and, as the artist describes, making a “home nonetheless,” continue to influence his artistic practice. The films in Subterranean Ceremonies revolve around transit and life on the road, a liminal zone the artist embraces as a space of community and knowledge production. Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021), for example, layers disjointed, often hypersaturated landscapes to ruminate on relationships of memory and place, while The Island Weights (2021) narrates a journey along the boundaries of Ho-Chunk homelands in search of four water spirits from the tribe’s creation story.
Hopinka’s project of Indigenous language recovery and translation is threaded through the exhibition. Coming of age without learning his geographically distant ancestral languages prompted the artist—then living in Washington and Oregon— to learn a language indigenous to the Pacific Northwest: Chinuk Wawa. The film Kicking the Clouds (2021) centers on a fifty-year-old audio recording of the artist’s grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. Hopinka combines the original recording with his mother’s reflections on the tape and their lives, as well as footage of their “chosen home” in Whatcom County, Washington: a place far from the family’s ancestral homelands but described by the artist as “a home nonetheless.”
The photographs in the exhibition glimpse disparate locations linked through the artist’s travels and include etched phrases drawn from stories, songs, and his own poetry. Guided by an impulse to wander, Hopinka’s artmaking defies ethnographic conventions and privileges Indigenous-centered approaches to storytelling.
ARTIST BIO
Sky Hopinka received a BA (2012) from Portland State University and an MFA (2016) from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Formerly an assistant professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College, Hopinka will begin an assistant professorship at Harvard University in 2024. His work has been shown at numerous film festivals including Sundance, Park City and Salt Lake City, UT; Courtisane, Ghent; Punto de Vista, Pamplona; Milwaukee Film Festival; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; and Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has also exhibited work at venues including Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018–2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and was a 2021 Forge Project Fellow. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography and was a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.
FRYE Art Museum
Sky Hopinka: Subterranean Ceremonies
February 17th – May 26th, 2024
With remarks from Sky Hopinka and Georgia Erger, Associate Curator.
