School of Art

One of the most compelling moving-image artists to emerge this decade, Sky Hopinka will present his digital films made between 2014 and 2017. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and is currently based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has studied and taught Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work centers around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and facets of culture contained within, and the play between the accessibility of the known and the unknowable. Films include I'll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You'll Become (2016), an elegy to poet Diane Burns; Dislocation Blues (2017), described by Hopinka "as an incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock," and others. - David Dinnell

 

 

"[Hopinka's films are] ...complex formal arrangements, conceptually and aesthetically dense and characterized by an intricate layering of word and image. They are wellsprings of beauty and mystery, filled with surprising confluences of speech and song, color and motion."

- Dennis Lim, Artforum