Kicking the Clouds (2021) by Sky Hopinka
Saturday, April 4, 2026, 7:00 pm
An Evening with Sky Hopinka
Sky Hopinka In Person
Presented in association with Canyon Cinema & Slash|
Admission: FREE (with limited capacity)
Register here (registration not required but appreciated)
Slash’s exhibition Sonic Transmissions (on view through April 18) explores and highlights the sonic aspects of filmmaker Sky Hopinka’s artistic practice. Sound allows for a different encounter, distinct from the act of seeing, and is, perhaps, more wholly personal, requiring a curious participation. Hopinka blends audio and sculpts aural tapestries not to function as a soundtrack to accompany his films, but to open up an entirely new sensorial dimension as a key to the present. In this site-specific exhibition, designed in collaboration with the artist, visitors are encouraged to pay attention to sounds as they require—even demand—a deeper listening, or a (re)listening to the confluence of what is audible: spoken, sung, drummed, unearthed and intertwined. This exhibition brings together videos spanning 2016 to 2025 that share the space with text and a playlist made by the artist for this exhibition. Sonic Transmissions is a conversation with ghosts, passengers, viewers, passersby, the unsuspecting and for tribal communities. Stop and listen. (Gina Basso, program curator)
On April 4 (7pm), join Sonic Transmissions curator Gina Basso and artist Sky Hopinka at Slash for a celebratory gathering as they head into the exhibition’s final weeks. With Hopinka as our special guest, we’ll take a deeper dive into his creative world through a three-part event that explores his approaches to sound in his video and writing practices. The event will open with a reading by Hopinka, followed by a 16mm film screening that puts his film Kicking the Clouds (2021) into dialogue with two short films selected by the artist from the Canyon Cinema catalogue. The evening will conclude with a short conversation between Basso and Hopinka and an audience Q&A.
Related event: This event follows a daytime screening of the feature-length Powwow People (2025), directed by Sky Hopinka and introduced by the artist, at the Roxie Theater. Full details and tickets here.
I make work for an Indigenous audience. You can watch if you’re not part of these communities. But just know that I’m not going to be doing a lot of explaining. And I don’t think it’s a lot to ask a non-Indigenous audience to try and keep up a little bit, or to try and ask questions later on, or to just stop and listen. (Sky Hopinka)
Sky Hopinka’s (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) cinematography gives the feeling of floating, as if led by an unseen presence through spaces permeated by sounds and echoes—rhythmic, vocal, choral, musical. This momentary look through Hopinka’s viewfinder is not a chance to walk in his footsteps or step into his experiences, but to be in observance, with ears attuned to his frequency. We are guided through powwows, down forest paths, through stretches of lonely highways and towards the land’s end. Each scene unfolds in a collage of moving images and sounds as if tuning a radio that vacillates between the diegetic and the external. We feel a sense of immersion and of being there, or having been there, even if in a dream (or hallucination). But remember: we’re just passengers. (Gina Basso)