Within and against the traditions of ethnography and landscape art, Sky Hopinka crafts painfully mournful videos that scan the distance between the cultural memory inscribed in traditional native lands and the present, scarred condition of those lands. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians of Riverside, California, Hopinka does not so much investigate his tribal roots as map his own uncertain proximity to them through a practice he describes as “ethno-poetic.” Pans and tracks across landscape enact this process visually, grounding the work in the immediate realm of physical perception. In the spirit of classical ethnography, Hopinka gathers recordings of oral testimony and texts rendered as on-screen titles that return this landscape to the mediated realm of language. Refusing any possibility of a reconciliation of these realms and thereby any direct knowledge of Native American experience, Hopinka’s videos offer instead glimpses of the boundless space between them. Laid in fragments over the soundtrack or superimposed over the images themselves, his linguistic sources confound the meanings they might merely convey. Manipulated digitally, his landscapes transform into hallucinatory mindscapes. Most of all, Hopinka finds in the hyper-saturation of color a method of hacking “the flat ethnographic image that stores as much information as it can” and, in so doing, restores a sense of the majestic worldview repressed by the western scientific gaze.
Sky Hopinka will present and discuss his work.