2022 | Sky Hopinka: Lore
EXHIBITION | June 7, 2022 – August 6, 2022
Lore, a 2019 film by Sky Hopinka, presents images of friends and landscapes cut, fragmented, and reassembled on an overhead projector as the artist’s hands guide their shape and construction. Overlaying the kaleidoscopic imagery, a narrator’s voice tells a ruminative story, weaving together family, myth, and trauma, with traces of nostalgia articulated in terms of lore. The film culminates in a languorous and communal scene as a group of musicians perform Bo Diddley’s 1955 “Heart-O-Matic Love,” a song about love as a road trip.
Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. He was born in Ferndale, Washington and moved to Southern California as a teenager, later spending a number of years in Portland, Oregon, where he studied and taught Chinuk Wawa, an amalgamated contact language of the Lower Columbia River Basin. Hopinka’s art centers around personal perceptions of Native homelands as well as correlations between language and culture in relation to home and land. Hopinka has said, “Deconstructing language [through cinema] is a way for me to be free from the dogma of traditional storytelling and then, from there, to explore or propose more of what Indigenous cinema has the possibility to look like.”
Organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU. Funding for this exhibition is provided by the members of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU. WSU Pullman is located on the ceded lands of the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce) Tribe and the traditional homelands of the Palus Band of Indians. We acknowledge their presence here since time immemorial and recognize their continuing connection to the land, to the water, and to their ancestors.
ABOUT | Sky Hopinka’s work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had solo exhibitions at the Great Poor Farm Experiment in 2019 and at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020. He was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and is a 2021 Forge Project Fellow.
He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently teaches at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts.
LOCATION | The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU is located in the Crimson Cube (on Wilson Road across from Martin Stadium and the CUB) on the WSU Pullman campus. For more information please visit museum.wsu.edu/about.
