I held an ancestor in my arms, and we spoke of dust. It’s time to go back to home To the mounds aways from the missions where they denied our heart and our blood. Adrift and wandering through prairies and deserts, belligerent and captive by borders bound by obstacles made of death and shame. It’s time to go home, and float breathlessly on currents of willow and pine.

—Sky Hopinka, ‘Sunflower Siege Engine’

Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles is pleased to announce ‘Under the Moon, Beneath the Flowers’ by Sky Hopinka, presenting a series of new photographic works, calligrams as well as the artist’s recent acclaimed film ‘Sunflower Siege Engine’. This is Hopinka’s second solo exhibition with Tanya Leighton and his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

‘Sunflower Siege Engine’ opens with a misty landscape sequence of Pacific Redwoods as the above passage crosses the screen in text, accompanied by a sombre soundscape. The film’s multi-sensory moment is key to Sky Hopinka’s exemplary aesthetic, which is as much aimed at eliciting an emotional tenor in the viewer as it is about holding their attention. The film’s disjunctive sensory composition creates unease, summoning the recollections and emotions buried in the pre-populated minds of viewers. In the film, Hopinka weaves and layers multiple narratives and aural and visual experiences to thematise the relationship between contemporary Indigenous experiences and historical, structural and colonial violence.

After its initial footage generates a contemplative mood, the film goes dark. As images return, we see Mohawk activist Richard Oakes on Hopinka’s laptop screen. It’s a recording of Oakes’s 1969 speech addressed to “the Great White Father and All His People” in which he states his reasons for leading the occupation of Alcatraz Island. From 20 November 1969 through 11 June 1971, Native people from a confederation of Indian tribes claimed Alcatraz as Indian land. Hopinka’s inclusion of this historical moment of active resistance articulates the artist’s disquietude regarding the realities of Natives today. As Hopinka says, “There’s no right way to be indin, just a whole bunch of wrong ways.”

Hopinka’s calligrams collect historical statements, poetry, dialogue, scholarly essays and recompose them onto gallery walls as single image figures with Native significance. To decipher the text requires a shift in one’s attention to the way the image/text flows, breaks and amalgamates. The text depicted in ‘Situated at the East End of Devils Lake on Sect 25 THN. R6B on N. Kirks Pleasure Ground’ (2018) is an excerpt from Eliot Weinberger’s ‘The Camera People’ (1992) and captures core themes of Hopinka’s practice—particularly, the ways in which identity is inextricably bound to place, memory and history.

As a whole, the exhibition captures the manner in which bodies either surrender to the ebb and flow of life experiences or violently contend with them. It considers how we can occupy multiple spaces at once both here and there, present and past, earthly and celestial and perhaps most acutely how to feel what we think we know.