He Who Wears Faces on His Ears, 2025
HD video, stereo, color, TRT 9:18

The piece moves through Indigenous mythologies and the ways they echo across present-day landscapes, surfacing as quiet and persistent currents. Drawing from the Ho-Chunk story of Red Horn (also known as He Who Wears Faces on His Ears) it circles the thresholds between human and spirit realms, attending to the cyclical routes that pattern myth, memory, and language.

Its gestures orbit cloud, text, and road, where language folds into atmosphere and re-emerges as shifting trace. Figures and places double and invert; images drift toward and away from legibility. Voices gather in a loose polyphony, touching the presences that shape how place is sensed and understood. What emerges is less a narrative than a return, an ongoing movement through stories that persist across time.

Calligram text from Yves Bonnefoy’s The Arrière-Pays.
Music by Thad Kellstadt.
Additional Music by Wisconsin Dells Singers.

I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become, 2016
Video, color, stereo, TRT 12:32

An elegy to Diane Burns on the shapes of mortality and being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death. A place for new mythologies to syncopate with deterritorialized movement and song, reifying old routes of reincarnation. Where resignation gives hope for another opportunity, another form, for a return to the vicissitudes of the living and all their refractions.

“I’m from Oklahoma I ain’t got no one to call my own.
If you will be my honey, I will be your sugar pie way hi ya
way ya hi ya way ya hi yo”

—Diane Burns (1957-2006)

Kicking the Clouds, 2021
16mm to HD video, stereo, color, TRT 15:37

This film is a reflection on descendants and ancestors, guided by a 50 year old audio recording of my grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. After being given this tape by my mother, I interviewed her and asked about it, and recorded her ruminations on their lives and her own. The footage is of our chosen home in Whatcom County, Washington, where my family still lives, far from our homelands in Southern California, yet a home nonetheless.

Sunflower Siege Engine, 2022
HD video, 16mm to HD video, stereo, color, TRT 12:23

Moments of resistance are collapsed and woven together; from documentation of the Indigenous led occupation of Alcatraz, to the reclamation of Cahokia and the repatriation of the ancestors, to one’s reflections on their body as they exist in the world today, These are gestures that meditate on the carceral inception and nature of the reservation system, and where sovereignty and belligerence intersect and diverge.

Join us on September 26 for an intimate evening with acclaimed artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka. The program will feature a curated showcase of Hopinka’s short films at Bull Room, followed by a conversation with the artist and curator Jami Powell. Complimentary beverages provided by Matchbook Distilling, Puntiagudo, and The Violette Wine Co.

We hope to see you there!

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) is a filmmaker, photographer, and artist. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, and considers language as a container of culture through personal, documentary, and nonfiction forms of media.

His work has screened at Sundance, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival, and has been featured in the Whitney Biennial, FRONT Triennial, Prospect.5, and the Gwangju Biennial. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, Hopinka’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other major institutions.

He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is an assistant professor in the department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Jami Powell is the Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College where she also serves as a senior lecturer in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department. Powell has curated exhibitions including Form and Relation: Contemporary Native American Ceramics, This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, and Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light). In 2025, she co-edited Re-Envisioning American Art: Transforming Museum Practice, which was published by the University of Washington press. She is on the board of directors for the Native American Art Studies Association and serves on advisory boards for Panorama and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Special thanks to Matchbook Distilling, Puntiagudo, and Violette Wine Co. for generous support.