Sky Hopinka’s “Red Metal Dust” at the Barnes Foundation Turns Copper Into a Timekeeper
Copper doesn’t just shine in Sky Hopinka’s new installation at the Barnes Foundation — it remembers.
Now on view in Philadelphia through next January, “Red Metal Dust” is a site-specific work by Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) that brings together a year and a half of travel and image-making across the United States. The multidisciplinary artist has constructed 11 panels that layer photographic landscapes with copper sheets, filtering American histories and terrain through an Indigenous perspective.
Hopinka’s practice has long tested the stability of the photographic image, treating it less as a fixed document than as a surface open to interruption. In conversation about the project, he described an ongoing interest in “ways to disrupt the photographic image,” noting that over the past six or seven years he has etched directly onto photographs. Copper, he said, offered a way to extend that impulse while drawing on a material with deep cultural resonance.
“Copper is a material I’ve always found beautiful, and it has a lot of cultural significance — not only for my tribe, but tribes across the continents,” Hopinka said.
The installation’s title is anchored in Ho-Chunk language and story. Hopinka explained that the Ho-Chunk word for copper, mąąsšuc, translates to “red metal.” The second half of the title, “dust,” comes from narratives that speak of people emerging from dust — a phrase that, in the context of the work, suggests both dispersal and persistence.
That tension runs through the project’s geography. The photographs were made over the last 18 months and move between vantage points that feel fleeting and expansive: images shot from the window of a cross-country Amtrak ride, and aerial photographs taken while flying over the United States. Hopinka photographed in Arizona and Washington State — including the coast he identifies as home and a place he returns to often with his camera — as well as Tulsa and Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
He has been careful to frame the selection as personal rather than encyclopedic. The project is not intended as a coast-to-coast survey, but as a constellation of places he has traversed or revisited while working on other bodies of work. In his account, the movement between sites also echoes the diasporic realities of Native life: a sense of being scattered, “like we’re dust,” while remaining materially present.
Copper becomes the installation’s quiet engine. As a surface metal, it registers touch, air, and time, changing through contact and wear. Hopinka links that physical responsiveness to Indigenous stories in which copper is understood as living — a substance with its own duration, from creation to the present.
At the Barnes, those ideas are staged in layers: landscape photographs that carry the trace of travel, and copper sheets that insist on time as something that accumulates on a surface. “Red Metal Dust” ultimately asks viewers to look at the American landscape not as a neutral backdrop, but as a place where histories settle, erode, and reappear — and where materials, like people, bear the marks of what they have endured.
