Object number2023.10
The mountains are growing and you're over there looking at me like that. These Breathings are begging's, these Breathings are asking for anything having to do with direction. Wrapped in these blankets made of clouds, Morning Star got up and pointed the way. We were too tired and too weak to proceed, but still the gesture is still in the east at a certain time of year.
Date2020
Artist
Sky Hopinka
(Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, born 1984)
CultureHo-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, American
MediumInkjet print with etching, mounted to board
EditionArtist's proof 1 from an edition of 3, plus 2 artist's proofs
DimensionsImage: 17 x 17 in. (43.2 x 43.2 cm)
Framed: 19 x 18 5/8 x 2 in. (48.3 x 47.3 x 5.1 cm)
Framed: 19 x 18 5/8 x 2 in. (48.3 x 47.3 x 5.1 cm)
Credit LinePurchase, gift of Mrs. Frederick Ferris Thompson, by exchange
On View
Not on viewPeriod21st c
Classification(s)
InscribedTombstone information printed on The Green Gallery label affixed to the reverse of the mount.
ProvenancePurchased from The Green GalleryVassar Exhibitions
Label Text
This aerial view of Mount Rainier belongs to Sky Hopinka’s series of Breathings, a collection of photographs that traces the artist’s itinerant travels throughout the United States.
Handwritten poems (reproduced as the works’ titles) are etched along the borders of each photograph, framing the images with intimate reflections and forceful invocations. Working with an analog medium format camera, Hopinka later inscribes each print using a rotary tool. Hopinka describes these photographs as “their own exaltations to the minute Heroka who bless
and raze and give direction to matters concerning life and death.” The etched language operates as what he has called ethnopoetic practice—a deliberate refusal of ethnographic documentation that seeks to fix Indigenous experience within settler frameworks. Against forms of representation that objectify Indigenous landscapes and cultures, the work creates its own temporal and spatial logics. These landscapes are, in the artist’s words, “squared away and bordered off by breaths etched on their surface outlining pleas for quiet and respite, and bearings to help traverse weary landscapes of wayward histories.”
DescriptionAn image of a mountain in the distance along the horizon, breaking through the clouds below while wispy clouds float in the sky above. Cursive text etched directly into the image creates a whitish text that borders the perimeter of the print. Terms
Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge.
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