Sky Hopinka Reframes the American Landscape at the Barnes Foundation

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Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) has been photographing American landscapes for the past year and a half. This journey across America culminates in a new site-specific installation titled red metal dustat the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. For this purpose, the multidisciplinary Native American artist constructed 11 panels, layering landscape photography and copper plates and filtering American history and landscapes from an Aboriginal perspective.

These contemplative photographic landscapes reference the Ho-Chunk tribe’s name for copper, a surface metal that is affected by its surroundings and wears away through physical contact. Looking forward to next January, red metal dust The audience is asked to think about the cycle of time – past, present, future – through copper itself. art news spoke with Hopinka about the impact of time and human presence on the American landscape in this new body of work.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.

ARTnews: How did you come up with the idea? red metal dust?

Hopinka Sky Hotel: I’ve been thinking about working with copper and building up my photo-making practice in a few different ways. Over the past six or seven years I have done some etching on photographic surfaces. I’ve been thinking about how to destroy photographic images. Copper is a material that I have always found beautiful, and it has a lot of cultural significance—not just to my tribe, but to tribes on every continent. This installation became a way to combine different elements that I had been thinking about formally, while also continuing to take photographs and use some of the different interventions I had created with transparencies, such as in previous works.

You mentioned the relationship your tribe and other tribes have with copper. I understand that the name of the device is derived from the Ho-Chunk name for the metal. Can you talk about this connection?

Copper has different uses, meanings and physical objects, and in our story copper is described as the third descendant of another stone. There’s something really moving about how you think about the people in these landscapes and images, how you think about making them yourself, and how you think about the people who look at them. Ho-Chunk word [for copper] Masuk Meaning “red metal”. The last part of the title, “Dust,” comes from this idea in the story of how man comes from dust.

What American landscapes and people do you choose to photograph?

They are all works from the past year and a half. They range from looking out the window while riding a cross-country Amtrak train to aerial photos taken over the United States. I photographed Arizona and Washington, specifically the coast where I’m from and which I really enjoy photographing, as well as Tulsa and Tahlequah, Oklahoma. These are places I’ve been to or where I’ve photographed for other projects.

This is not meant to be a coast-to-coast survey of North America or the United States, but these are places I have traveled that are important to me. Consider this combined with the diasporic nature of Aboriginality – it sometimes feels like we are like dust, but there is substance to this presence, no matter how spread out we are, or how far away from our homes we are. This felt like an encouraging reason to use this material, while copper was also treated as a living thing in our story. In the work, there’s this idea that it’s very dynamic from the time it was created to where we are now.

As a surface metal, copper exhibits the effects of environment and wear through physical contact. Tell me about the material mix.

I spent days polishing and cleaning every copper surface, knowing that it would oxidize, it would breathe, and it would reflect living conditions, which I think is really beautiful.

As people pass through this space, their breath, their presence, what they emit affects the color of this material, and then it becomes like a reflection of all the people passing through this space at this moment. In many ways, this is life, both metaphorically and physically. I don’t know what will happen [change] Next year or the next 10 months, but I’m looking forward to seeing how copper reacts. It is this small act of reflection on life that reminds us of where we have been and where we are going.

It’s a very intimate collaborative installation between yourself, the audience and the element of time. You mentioned going back to some of the techniques you used before.

Yes, all the photos were taken on film – some medium format, some 35mm. In some ways, these works function a bit like diaries, but the overlay of transparencies over the images further alludes to a series of works titled The Land Describes Itself [2019]. It was great to revisit the technique of printing photos on transparent paper and placing them on another projector, then superimposing them in different configurations over photographic landscapes. It’s a complex process, but it’s another intervention that affects the landscape in a way that resonates with my memory.

Untitled 11 An example of this involves people walking away with their backs to the camera.

There is a metaphor of Indians walking away into the sunset and peacefully handing over their land to white settlers. This is how I use this metaphor. The photo itself was taken at the time of booking. Copper then is about interventions that structure life and existence.

I know copper has tribal significance and was also used heavily in the United States to cast the now-defunct pennies and to make the Statue of Liberty, among other things. Have you considered these connections?

I thought about this, but it’s also a metal that’s thousands of years old and used by Aboriginal people. Of course, there’s always going to be a focus on American lands, especially in Indigenous work, because that’s how we’re framed. I’ve been interested in trying to ignore this. My work is not a response to America’s 250th anniversary, coins, the Statue of Liberty, or copper roofs.

Philadelphia is known as the birthplace of the United States. Is there any significance in exhibiting this work here on the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China?

This is not the case. There are 250 years of history to unravel, but also the relationship with the tribe and this place in the years before that. It’s hard to distill the meaning here. There is also the history of the Barnes family and the collector himself. History is a way of abstracting routes and lineages, the continuation of existence that reminds you actual bloodline and actual Man as the continuation of humanity, and our place on that continuum. That’s what I think. There is a long history of Aboriginal people coming to this city and living in this country, and a nation is moving and claiming Aboriginal land, but here we are today. It’s important to connect to that history and remember that history, and it’s important what happened next. I exist here, in this moment, in this year, in this day. But what will happen next year? There is also a view that life comes from dust, so what will the afterlife look like?

What do you hope people take away from this installation?

I don’t know, because these works don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in conversation with many other things. I have reasons and ways of making these, but whoever comes here, they’re not just American, they’re not just white, they’re going to come from all backgrounds. The interpretations, stories and experiences people bring to the table are part of the survival and existence of the work. This is the vitality of art.