He Who Wears Faces on His Ears

Overview

He Who Wears Faces on His Ears, Sky Hopinka (2025) The piece moves through Indigenous mythologies and the ways they echo across present-day landscapes, surfacing as quiet and persistent currents. Drawing from the Ho-Chunk story of Red Horn (also known as He Who Wears Faces on His Ears) it circles the thresholds between human and spirit realms, attending to the cyclical routes that pattern myth, memory, and language. Its gestures orbit cloud, text, and road, where language folds into atmosphere and re-emerges as shifting trace. Figures and places double and invert; images drift toward and away from legibility. Voices gather in a loose polyphony, touching the presences that shape how place is sensed and understood. What emerges is less a narrative than a return, an ongoing movement through stories that persist across time. Calligram text from Yves Bonnefoy’s The Arrière-Pays Music by Thad Kellstadt Additional Music by Wisconsin Dells Singers