Did You See the Island?: Sky Hopinka on Film and Knowledge

In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Ways of Knowing, Sky Hopinka sat down with Curatorial Assistant Brandon Eng and Manager of Interpretation Janine DeFeo for a conversation about his 2016 film Visions of an Island, featured in the exhibition. The film presents Hopinka’s observations of Saint Paul Island, Alaska. Nine years after its release, the artist talked about filming and editing with a sense of distance and structuring his films to teach viewers how to watch them.

Janine DeFeo

What brought you to Saint Paul Island?

Sky Hopinka

I was working with a language revitalization organization called Where Are Your Keys. And in the summer, they were asked to help facilitate the development of curriculum for Unangam Tunuu, the language indigenous to the island. I’d worked with them for a number of years and so I went along as well and worked helping to develop curriculum. I also had my camera with me, so I was filming some language lessons.

We were there for about three months, working five days a week, living on the island. It was pretty formative. And over the course of the summer, I wanted to do some filming outside of the language courses, so I started wandering around and asking questions.

Brandon Eng

Could you say a little bit about Gregory Fratis Sr.? Who is he and how did he become the primary voice in the film?

SH

Greg Fratis Sr. was one of the fluent elders that we were working with over the course of the summer. He’d come in once a week and test what we were developing and designing, help us with the language and pronunciation and figuring out what comes next. But he also had a lot of stories to tell. He was a fisherman for a long time, most of his life. He knows the island in and out. He was the first person I thought of when I wanted to have a voice in the film, to help ground it a bit.

After I left the island I asked Evan and Susanna, the people from Where Are Your Keys, to interview him for me and to ask these questions.

One of the things I thought was important [to ask] at first was, “Which is the highest peak on the island?” Because it’s a small island, 13 miles by seven miles across. And I just assumed the tallest mountain must be a site of significance. But [Fratis] was like, “No, no, it’s not the peaks, it’s the cliffs.” Because that’s where the birds would come to and migrate. Over the course of the summer you would get over 200 species of birds. So those are very important.

And I really enjoyed that moment because it challenged and countered the assumptions I brought with me. And that distance and that correction was something that helped shape how I viewed the film, or how I was viewing the edits. I don’t necessarily want to be an authority on this place, but rather have this idea of a vision—this idea of something hazy and uncertain—be felt through my gaze and be transferred onto the viewer.

JD

Is there an ideal experience you want viewers to have with this work? Do you have something specific you want people to take away, or is it more open-ended?

SH

What I want viewers to take away from this is generally more open-ended than any specific experience. There is a sense of distance: It comes from me not interviewing Greg, and having that felt in the edits, him talking about “If you ever come to visit this place.” Small nudges toward dislocating a viewer and how they’re positioning themselves in front of the screen or how they’re viewing it is important to me. Because it’s not an overt sort of distancing, but rather it is acknowledging these different barriers or screens that we filter knowledge through. And it makes us question, or hopefully question, our knowledge out of what we learned from watching something for 15 minutes—or how impossible that is.

There’s a lot of moving parts in the film, and some are more subtle than others. But my hope is that the experience of feeling uncertain is also a way for viewers to bring their own experiences into the piece.

BE

This work is from 2016; next year, it will be 10 years old. Can you say a little bit about where you feel this work sits within your development and trajectory as an artist and how it feels to look back on it now?

SH

This was one of the last pieces I’d made before I graduated from grad school. And over the course of those three years, I had dived into this idea of the ethnopoetic and looking at the history of ethnographic cinema. Whose voices have been marginalized in that history? What does it mean for people who traditionally have had cameras pointed at them to then pick up the cameras and start pointing them at things that they want to look at?

And I don’t want to say this caps off my work around the ethnopoetic, but I do think that it was very much a point where all cylinders were firing as far as thinking about this stuff. I was thinking about how to incorporate music and how to incorporate digital abstraction—things that are foundational for my work.

This is one of the longer pieces I had done at that point. I really gained a lot of confidence in what I was doing. This is one of the first pieces where I include my own writing, which happens near the end where it appears as text, without any voiceover. Since then, I do a lot of digital abstractions. I write a lot that is incorporated into my films and videos. I think this was the beginning and a transition point between what I had been doing to where I’m at right now.

BE

Could you say a little more about the way that abstraction functions in your work? It’s both readily apparent and also quite subtle in this work. Even disregarding the moments where you use doubling or mirroring effects, these long landscape shots have elements where the screen fills and becomes this abstraction of green and blue.

SH

One of the first works where I’d started to lean into, or just feel more comfortable playing around with, digital abstractions was Jáaji Approx, which I had made just before this film. I wanted the things that I was doing in that, formally, to have their own logic for that film. And when I was doing some of the same things—whether that’s an inversion or a layering, or double landscape, or whatever it is—I wanted that to have its own logic within this film.

It’s a small thing, but I don’t necessarily want to lean too much on an established lexicon of moves and things that I do that can be easily read across works. In some ways, I want them to be able to be read. But in other ways, I want each film to occupy its own space and its own rules and its own logic.

With a lot of my work, I want to teach a viewer how to watch it within the first few minutes. To show them the moves that I’m doing, whether it’s abstraction or language or text or music, to help ground them in some of that logic—and, in a way, to teach them how to watch it. I want to be generous in that way. Because a lot of other things are obfuscated and abstracted in the work, whether that’s a deeper meaning or cultural references, language, what have you. My hope is that the effects, the ways that the works can speak for themselves and touch on these shared understandings of visual language, can be a way into the work.

The abstraction is never for the sake of it. But it’s a means to try to create a web of thoughts and ideas that can be shared, if not understood.

JD

That’s so beautiful, that pedagogy, that you set up the work to teach people how to watch it. Has that been part of your practice from the very beginning?

SH

I was taught to teach by Evan Gardner, who is in Visions of an Island and who I’d been working with. I’d started making films around the same time I started working with Chinuk Wawa and language revitalization.

A big part of his pedagogy is to try to dismantle hierarchies between the teacher and the student. As the teacher, I want to teach my students the tricks I’m using, the things that make things easier, in hopes they’d also use that on me. [Gardner] has this idea of “No thinking, no suffering” when it comes to learning. You don’t want to make your students suffer. You want to make it easy on them in terms of how they receive information.

That really has come through in how I think about filmmaking, the idea of scaffolding and understanding that every student comes to learning at a different level. How can you meet them where they’re at and try to scaffold to where they want to be, or where they need to be, for whatever comes next.

JD

I was wondering if you could discuss a little bit about how language shows up in this piece and across your work.

SH

The first instance of language comes through the Russian Orthodox tropar in the beginning. For me that is a gesture toward the history of colonization on the island, and the influence of Russian Orthodoxy on the people, because those were the first colonizers, the first settlers, there.

I wanted to introduce that in a way where it wasn’t necessarily about judgments or about my own sense of values, but just an acknowledgement of this history and how it exists. You see the Russian Orthodox cross in the background in that pan around the island. The song itself is beautiful. And it’s a way to set the stage, but then also introduce these elements that might not be readily understood or apparent, especially when it comes to these symbols and signs.

Greg Fratis Sr. talking about the language and the landscape was important. It isn’t necessarily giving access to the words themselves, the language, but how it’s utilized and how it might exist in these different spaces, whether it’s the cliffs, or this field where the fur seals would nest and mate during the summer. But now they’re not there anymore, or they’re there in smaller numbers due to climate change and overfishing and overharvesting of them.

There’s the language class, which you hear a little bit of. You see them in silhouettes, partly to protect their privacy, but also to see the way that the language is used in situ. You have this classroom, you have the outdoors, you have a testing of language and playing these games—different ways that the language occupies these different spaces. And quiet ways, I think. That was what was important to me about this.

Even the text itself at the end, about a “sunshine holiday.” During the summer on the islands, if there’s ever a day where the sun’s out, everyone takes the day off because it’s so rare. It’s usually cloudy and overcast so they call it a “sunshine holiday.”

Those little dislocated moments of voice and presence stake out different ideas of understanding, which aren’t necessarily about triangulating some greater meaning. Rather how these things can be in relation without necessarily having to generate something that is whole or complete.

BE

You’ve spoken in interviews about the importance of allowing for uncertainty, for certain kinds of not knowing in your work, that it’s not always about showing and explaining everything. Can you say a little more about those dynamics in your practice? And if you have any thoughts about showing this work in a group exhibition called Ways of Knowing?

SH

Showing this work in an exhibition called Ways of Knowing underscores the importance of the varied ways of knowing. It isn’t necessarily about the idea of facts as knowledge, but the intrinsic things that occupy our spaces and our hearts and the ways that we move through the world; those are important also, even if they’re not valued as such.

This piece is very much about ways of knowing that are non-Western traditional, or part of a textbook, or part of what you learn in a classroom. It’s about wandering and trying to understand places through wandering. On their own terms.

I think less about uncertainty being the focal point, but rather trying to encourage myself, and encourage viewers, to abandon the ideas of certainty that have guided them, guided us, guided me through most of our lives. There’s importance to that, but there’s also importance in trying to understand the things that are around you in ways that you might not be accustomed to seeing them or might not be told have value.

That’s why I like to end the film on Greg saying, “If you ever see this place, if you ever come to visit it.” For me, when I edited it the first time, it was a jarring way of thinking back on the film you just watched. Because often these travelogues, it’s about: Come join us as we learn and travel this place and get to know the locals. But “If you ever see it” is what Greg says. So, it’s like: Did you see the island? What did you see? It’s very much mediated by me and my camera and my editing choices. But it’s also why I was thinking about this as a sort of vision.

What was the bigger journey here? I think about that with this film and how that reflects on other works I’ve done recently. What are they doing, and what are they really trying to get you to pay attention to?▪︎

Experience Visions of an Island for yourself at the Walker as part of Ways of Knowing, on view through Sept 7, 2025.

Hear from the artist directly. An audio portion of this conversation is available in the exhibition audio guide found on the Bloomberg Connects app.