Strange Lands features artists Sky Hopinka, Chris T. Cornelius, and Tom Antell. Together, they collectively frame their artwork around essential conflicts of the American landscape.

The violent removal of Native people from their land is a defining element of American agrarian idealism. This original sin haunts the artworks of these Indigenous artists. Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. Antell is a member of the Minnesota Chippewa, and Chris T. Cornelius is a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.

In their work, landscape, memory, and legacy combine in open-ended narratives that simultaneously describe personal and collective experience. Strange Lands examines the artwork and voices of these artists in the context of contemporary canons of art, but also demonstrates their singular experience as Indigenous Americans.

An intentional hesitancy to tie up loose ends emerges as a compelling component in the work of these artists. Cornelius describes this type of storytelling as having an inherent Indigeneity. The end is not the end, as these artists unearth unconscious and overt trauma, memory, and loss. In curating Strange Lands, I was drawn to this ambiguity, that these artworks offer a tangential experience, grounded as much in a realm of dream and history as in the known world.

Tom Antell uses cartoon imagery and dark humor in his paintings, playing out absurd, colorful allegories on the blasted agrarian landscapes of corporate farms and colonized fields. Strange Lands will be Antell’s first exhibition.

Chris T. Cornelius is an architect and Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of New Mexico. He is the founding principal of Studio: Indigenous, a design practice serving Indigenous clients, and uses an expansive drawing practice as an endemic process of creation and storytelling,

Sky Hopinka is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. His projects have been exhibited at the Tate Modern and the Whitney Biennial. “Perfidia,” an artist’s book that Hopinka published in 2020, translates from Spanish to “perfidy,” an act of treachery or betrayal. Hopinka’s hushed and atmospheric poetry obliquely communicates this theme. In combination with his film works, his poetry voices a lost and longing search.

Me and you and I and we wandering in wounded realms
Where roaming is often remembered as a solipsistic search
For the other.

Curatorial Statement
Rafael Francisco Salas

Top Image: Chris T. Cornelius, Maple Sugar Moon, n.d. (detail)
Left Image: Tom Antell, Agrarian Ideal–Bombhead, 2018