Sky Hopinka: Kicking the Clouds

The voice on the tape is Sky Hopinka's grandmother, learning the Pechanga language from her own mother. In his film Kicking the Clouds (2021), Hopinka plays that rare recording, and a newer interview with his mother, over 16mm footage of gatherings and landscapes in Whatcom County, Washington, with subtitles that shift between English and Indigenous languages.

The 15-minute film gives this small, focused show its title. Around it hang photographs with Hopinka's poems and recollections etched into the surface: four large prints from his Sunflower Series on Cahokia and Dickson Mounds, Indigenous sites in Illinois excavated in the 20th century, and two from Breathings (2020). There is also a calligram that turns text from an ethnographic study into the shape of a Ho-Chunk effigy mound.

You have to stand close to read the etched words, and one title alone runs to three sentences. Leave time for the whole film. It's in Gallery G22 on the West Building's ground floor, free with no passes needed, until 6 December.