Sky Hopinka, “Subterranean Ceremonies”

By T.s. Flock

March 2, 2024

Frye Art Museum Seattle, Washington

“Resilient” and “resilience” are perhaps the most tired and grating complimentary terms that racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities can hear these days. We hear them so very often. It is faint, paternalistic praise for surviving inhumane and even potentially deadly systems of power, which seem to be tightening their grip daily. “You’re so resilient,” is the magic phrase for people who benefit from those systems and want to assuage their conscience without having the moral courage to face what would happen if those systems were torn down.

Sky Hopinka, still from “Mnemonics of Shape and Reason,” 2021, single channel HD video, run time 04:13

Sky Hopinka’s solo show “Subterranean Ceremonies” does something quite magical in its messaging: it bypasses that one-sided expectation of “You’re so resilient,” and declares “WE’RE so resilient” in exceedingly loving and tender ways. The declaration is for his family, for his community, but also for humanity more broadly. This declaration subtly pulls away those excuses we might make for tacitly giving into the demands of these oppressive systems.

The show comprises four short video installations, alongside large photographic prints, each augmented with a handwritten sentence. At the entrance is the shortest and smallest in scale and shortest in length, “Mnemonics of Shape and Reason” (2021) which uses some footage that one will later see in the exhibit. It’s a visually appealing invocation that layers and abstracts landscapes, human silhouettes, sometimes inverting the former so that up is down, and inverting the latter so that dark is light.

Sky Hopinka, “Death on the tracks across the river and you stood in the falls, falls from another time all dried up and smooth walls cleaned by the gentle stroke of sons and ages and ancestors. Verdancy and violence hum under everything here. Yet not you, tenderly” from “Flesh and Ghosts” series, 2021, inkjet with hand scratched text and UV laminate, 60 x 30”

This inversion and play with light becomes more fully developed in the next room, featuring the two-channel video, “The Island Weights” (2021) whose two halves are projected perpendicular to each other in the corner of the room. My one quibble with the entire show is that the acoustics make the sparse narration difficult to understand, but the lush sound design fills the room nicely.

That narration is a Ho-Chunk creation story, about the four eponymous Island Weights: “water spirits placed at the four corners of the earth to keep it from spinning chaotically.” The narrator is seeking to revive these spirits amid an utterly changed world. I could write this entire review about all the wonderful techniques and juxtapositions that Hopinka packs into ten minutes. It reads as a melancholy travelogue akin to one of my own favorite films, Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil.” As in that film, the search is not for a specific place, but rather a sense of place, and the peace that might come with it.

Sky Hopinka, still from “The Island Weights,” 2-channel HD video, run time 10:00

The vernacular videography combines digital and 16mm footage, from the interiors of shopping malls, to summery vistas of the Mississippi, to walks on packed earth through the woods so familiar I could almost feel the heat of the sun on me. The camera at one point lingers on a marker of prehistoric burial mounds, where a little league team mills about in the background and parking lots run the perimeter.

In the next room, one breaks from this more abstract and longing approach to hear directly from Hopinka’s mother and grandmother. “Kicking the Clouds” (2021) is a tender but matter-of-fact interview that includes a fifty-year-old audio recording of Hopinka’s grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother, followed by an interview that he conducted with his own mother.

The film is intimate in tone, content and presentation, but nothing voyeuristic. It does not linger on trauma enough for people with an appetite for that, instead focusing on expressions of maternal love. Visitors who might not know where to start with the more abstract content of the other films and photos in the show will be given a comfortable foothold. The unifying message here is to stay in a state of openness and love. Whatever we might call “resilience” in humans comes naturally to us if we are willing and able to do that.

Sky Hopinka, still from “Kicking the Clouds,” 2021, single channel HD video, run time 15:37

“In Dreams and Autumn” (2021) is presented in three channels in one long row. The videos are, like The Island Weights, not always linked in obvious ways, but the short lines of narration are presented in text that drifts between channels, which is helpful for those of us who struggle to make out the spoken words, and also ties together the images in a dream logic, befitting Hopinka’s desire for the piece: “A letter to a sibling, reflecting on our pasts and ourselves and the parents and grandparents we knew and could never know.”

Again, what Hopinka is modeling here is profoundly personal loyalty, love and attachment that offers a map for a more universal expression of the same. Sadly, though we should hope that this would come naturally to us, it feels more necessary than ever.

Returning to “resilience” ... it often seems to be the word of choice in “celebrating” the indigenous people of this continent, who have been subjected to multiple waves of genocide in various forms. Here in Seattle, where every cultural event is preceded by a land acknowledgment, one hears it a lot. We see it thrown around in media for those experiencing active and brutal genocide, most saliently in multiple countries in Africa and in Gaza.

Sky Hopinka, still from “In Dreams and Autumn,” 2021, 3-channel HD video, run time 11:04

Before Hopinka’s show, the room presenting “The Island Weights” was the theatre for Clarissa Tossin’s “Before the Volcanoes Sing,” which featured individuals working to preserve indigenous languages and knowledge systems. It invited one to reckon with the truly magical powers of language and music. In doing so we become more conscientious of our own use of it, and respect those who carry within them other systems that might expand our perspectives.

“Subterranean Ceremonies” is both visually and thematically fluid, and reminds us that this exercise of curiosity and openness is not purely intellectual. It is a state of grace in itself. Frye’s curators, Amanda Donnan and Georgia Erger, are to be credited for programming these shows back-to-back, because they have spoken to each other and to us wonderfully.

T.s. Flock is a writer and arts critic based in Seattle and co-founder of Vanguard Seattle.