Sky Hopinka at Spritz3000

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

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

In Everything to be obliterated, a dense expanse of clouds fills the frame, their shifting grays carrying both weight and motion. Across this unsettled sky, Hopinka inscribes fragments of text: “Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain, wash away everything again. On the road and on the street with so many things at our feet.” The words arc like a horizon, where image and language commingle. Light filters through in muted flashes, holding a tension between erasure and persistence. The photograph becomes a space where memory, poetry, and atmosphere converge.

etched text
Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain, wash away everything again. On the road and on the street with so many things at our feet.

In the Sunflower series, Sky Hopinka brings together expansive skies, roads, and horizons with etched fragments of text, creating photographs where image and language intertwine. Clouds shift from shadow to brilliance, highways extend toward vanishing points, and twilight landscapes hold both the weight of memory and the promise of renewal. Across these scenes, Hopinka inscribes words of reflection, longing, and kinship—gestures that transform atmosphere into a space of storytelling. Rooted in Indigenous landscapes, histories, and writings, the series situates travel and weather as more than backdrop; they emerge as active participants in a geography shaped by memory, poetry, and presence.

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

IIn Road to Meskwaki, a highway stretches toward a setting sun, its horizon framed by fields and the silhouette of industry. The photograph grounds itself in the road leading to the Meskwaki Settlement in Tama County, Iowa, yet expands into a personal terrain of memory and reflection. Scratched across the twilight sky, Sky Hopinka’s words trace gestures of the body and echoes of lineage: “…the way my hands look when they type these words, when they clap real loud, when they squeeze yours real tight…” Here, travel becomes inseparable from remembrance, where movement through place also carries the weight of continuity and kinship.

etched text
I think to myself as I think about body and face
and form and place, and, the way my hands look when they type these words, when they clap real loud,

when they squeeze yours real tight,
when they hold these books,
when they clutch that beer,
when they shake late at night after tossin and turnin for hours on end

tryin to dream those dreams I had when I was small when you were old and
and I saw them in your words
and heard your voice.

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

In My distant god, billowing clouds stretch across the frame, shifting from shadowed masses to luminous whites against a deep blue sky. Along the treeline, Hopinka etches fragments of text: “The sun is short when it’s so high, beating down and us collapsing under its heat. An eventual burn that is neither about the before or the after, rather a longing for both.” The scene moves between heaviness and clarity, where atmosphere and inscription commingle. Here, the sky becomes a sentient space, approached with reverence, holding both transitory weather and enduring reflection.

etched text
The sun is short when it’s so high, beating down and us collapsing under its heat. An eventual burn that is neither about the before or the after, rather a longing for both.

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

In Earthmaker considers the mountain, Sky Hopinka overlays a luminous sky with handwritten text from poet Adrian C. Louis’s 1995 poem The Heart’s Hole: “Love the distant roar of the sin you’ve been. Love the distant roar of the skin you’re in.” The words trace the horizon, where image and language commingle. Saturated reds and violets shift into darkness, evoking both intensity and mystery. By threading Louis’s verse into the photograph, Hopinka situates his work within an Indigenous literary lineage, transforming the landscape into a site where memory, poetry, and place converge.

etched text
As Adrian once said, “Love the distant roar of the sin you’ve been. Love the distant roar of the skin you’re in.” The skin we’re in is mottled and marked, seen by the flowers in our eyes.

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.