Sky Hopinka: Exhibition Walkthrough and Reading

The exhibition will include three videos: Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2018), Fainting Spells (2018), and Jáaji Approximately (2015). Each work is a constellation of stories carefully woven together through image, sound, narration, and text. Sky Hopinka’s practice revolves around his personal experience of Indigenous homeland and landscape, and as such his work mines memory, language and his Ho-Chunk cultural heritage. The exhibition’s title, Around the Edge of Encircling Lake, takes its name from the Ho-Chunk way of describing the movement around the boundaries of the earth.”

Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, Milwaukee, WI, and is currently based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. 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. He is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, and Projections.  His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial.  He was awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, 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.