The Unruly Exuberance of Sky Hopinka’s Videos

By Brian Karl

In an era in which American nativism is strenuously proclaimed on behalf of non-Indigenous settler descendants, thoughtful exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art matter more than ever. In ‘Sonic Transmissions’, curated by Gina Basso, at Slash in San Francisco, Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) conjures idiosyncratic media poetics while grappling with Indigenous survivance in late modernity. Musing on memory traces that are both personal and collective, current and historical, Hopinka overlaps moving images of down-to-earth scenes of everyday human interactions with varieties of hypnagogic abstraction, which can only be generated through digital manipulations of audiovisual recordings. His renderings make dream-reveries the critical stuff of life, and lived-life fundamentally connected to dreams.