Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

Sky Hopinka is of Pechanga heritage and an active speaker and teacher of the Chinuk Wawa language native to the Columbia River Basin of the Pacific Northwest. Uniquely concerned with ethnographic landscapes, Hopinka captures them with a rare intensity that aims to contribute to the development of Native aesthetics within experimental cinema.

Hopinka’s video Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021) traverses the memory of a place and space visited by the artist. Employing an original syntax of storytelling, the artist interweaves scattered and reassembled landscapes with layers of captured audio, poetic text, and music. A rhythmic account of the spiritual implications of colonial plunder, Hopinka’s fluid reflections transmute ideas of spiritual malleability tied to land, sky, sea, myth, place, and personhood.