Sky Hopinka — Spritz3000

Sky Hopinka
(b. 1984) based in Brooklyn, New York

In the Sunflower series, Sky Hopinka combines photographic landscapes with scratched handwritten text, layering image and language into a single visual field. The photographs often depict skies, horizons, and transitional light, while the inscriptions trace memory, reflection, and fragments of narrative. This interplay turns each work into both a visual record and a site of storytelling—where clouds and roads hold meaning alongside the artist’s words. Together, the images form a constellation of places and thoughts, at once personal and expansive.

Inkjet with hand-scratched text and UV laminate, framed
39×39 in.

In Road to Meskwaki, a two-lane road runs straight toward a distant horizon, framed by fields and scattered trees beneath a sky of vivid blue and drifting cumulus. Scratched along the lower edge, Hopinka’s handwriting threads through the view: “…the sun as what we would have called it…”. The photograph grounds itself in a specific route to the Meskwaki Settlement while infusing it with personal geography—where the act of travel is inseparable from memory, lineage, and the continuation of place.

Inkjet with hand-scratched text and UV laminate, framed
40×40 in.

My distant god captures billowing clouds stretching across the frame, shifting from darkened masses to luminous whites. Along their contours, etched script drifts like windborne thought: “…and since my troubles could… as the many things that are…”. The scene moves between heaviness and clarity, holding the transitory nature of both weather and reflection. Hopinka treats the sky as a sentient space, approached with reverence, where the unseen is acknowledged through fleeting gestures of light, form, and speech.

Inkjet with hand-scratched text and UV laminate, framed
40×40 in.

In Everything to be obliterated, a dense layer of clouds fills the frame, their shifting grays carrying both weight and movement. Rising from the horizon, Hopinka’s inscribed words arc across the sky: “…each note came from the distant roar…”. The light seeps through in muted flashes, suggesting a world in the midst of change. The photograph holds a tension between erasure and persistence, inviting reflection on how even what fades from view can leave an enduring resonance.

Inkjet with hand-scratched text and UV laminate, framed
40×40 in.

Earthmaker considers the mountain shows the sun setting over a low horizon, its orange light mirrored in a small pool of water. A dark building shape anchors the right edge, while the sky above carries an extended passage of scratched handwriting: “I think to myself about…”. The title invokes the Ho-Chunk creator Earthmaker, positioning the scene between the earthly and the mythic. Hopinka folds recollection into creation, offering a moment suspended between day’s end and the beginning of another story.

Sky Hopinka (b. 1984, Ferndale, Washington) is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores personal and cultural histories of Native communities, often centering the language, landscapes, and narratives of his Ho-Chunk Nation and Pechanga Band of Luiseño heritage. Merging documentary and experimental approaches, Hopinka weaves together moving image, photography, and text to create layered, lyrical meditations on place, identity, and the poetics of translation. His photographs, like his films, are attentive to the relationships between land and story—offering still, distilled images that hold the same formal precision and associative depth found in his moving images. Often combining text and image, they extend his interest in how Indigenous experience is inscribed in place and how language shapes perception. Hopinka’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, FRONT International, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among others, and is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center. He is a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow and lives in New York.