Love and Survivance in American Landscape

Photography and short films by Marcella Ernest & Sky Hopinka | Dates TBD

For its 2024-25 exhibit, LightField Arts will assemble works by Marcella Ernest and Sky Hopinka, two filmmakers and photographers whose practices call on landscape to summon heritage and assert presence.

Traversing terrain marked by forced dislocation or cultural erasure, Marcella and Sky build visual-aural quests that enchant specific landscapes into revealing legacy, birthright and presence. The mapped, physical world—road, border, site—is a departure point for going out of time, into loss and love, language and story. Individual seekers roam land and road, recollecting self, yet also in dialog with family and loved ones, the spiritual beyond, and the physical landscape itself. The wind in the trees, the motion of a duck swimming under green water, and the guttural vibration of a car engine on a lonesome highway all become a kind of language of this landscape. As well, Native languages spoken by the filmmakers’ families reflect the ravishing beauty and spiritual intensity of the artists’ quests.

The tools freely and creatively used in Survivance include archival and contemporary imagery, diary entries, Native spoken language, poetry, song, and recordings of indigenous elders handing down stories about places marked by sacredness or violent dislocation.

In asserting their — and humanity’s — presence, Sky and Marcella indirectly point to the birth of a new type of citizen, arising in response to the climate destruction we face at every turn. This character is grounded in its connection to the natural world and its cycles. It places self in the context of family and cosmological networks, not the reverse. In the artists’ works, the sheer, earthly pleasures of the natural world tilt into the sacred, where beauty is an inheritance available to all to claim.

This is LightField Arts' fifth multi-artist, lens-based exhibit.