In brief

  • Sky Hopinka's video Visions of an Island is on view at Cleveland Museum of Art.
  • The video was shot on the remote island of St. Paul off the west coast of Alaska.
  • The work is part of Hopinka's ongoing exploration of how language, environment and history shape Indigenous identity.

Cleveland Museum of Art is presenting a solo exhibition featuring Sky Hopinka's video Visions of an Island. This piece represents one segment of Hopinka's ongoing exploration of how language, environment and history shape Indigenous identity.

Filmed on the remote island of St. Paul off the west coast of Alaska, Visions of an Island documents the life of the Unangax̂ (Aleuts) through a lens that dismantles the typical Western ethnographic approach. Shot while Hopinka was visiting the island as part of a language revitalization program, images of the land, sea and the Indigenous inhabitants blur and merge into each other through Hopinka's deft usage of superimposition, collage and textured audio tracks.

An expansive view of the blue ocean with a light blue sky above it, and a subtitle that reads "You said there isn't a word for a thousand."
Sky Hopinka, Visions of an Island, 2016. Courtesy Walker Art Center and Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.

Language and landscape are ever-present: an Unangam Tunuu elder describes the island's natural beauties, its craggy cliffs, the multitude of birds that come to nest on its shores; students working with teachers through play to revitalize their native tongue; the chanting of a tropar at the Russian Orthodox church in the village. Hopinka's vision extends beyond contemplating language itself to how it is utilized and how it subsists in different spaces.

Visions of an Island also challenges the accepted Western perception of certainty, of grounding reality in facts and documented knowledge, dislodging the viewer's notion of rationality towards a mode of knowing that relies more on the heart, of wandering, of understanding things intrinsically, directly. Hopinka's solo exhibition at Cleveland Museum of Art opened on August 11, 2026 and is on view until January 10, 2027.

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