2019-2020
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Oregon and California. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His work has been exhibited around the world, including at ImagineNATIVE, Sundance, TIFF, NYFF, the Whitney Biennial (2017), and four previous editions of Media City Film Festival. His film Jáaji Approx. was awarded MCFF’s Third Prize (2014). He is the recipient of the More with Less Award from the Images Festival (2016), the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival (2016), the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship (2018). He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2018-2019), and Sundance (2019). He currently teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Colombia.
The searching, striking digital films of Sky Hopinka are complex formal arrangements, conceptually and aesthetically dense, characterized by an intricate layering of word and image. But they are also wellsprings of beauty and mystery, filled with surprising confluences of speech and song, color and motion. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, Hopinka (three of whose shorts are featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, opening this month in New York) has described his work as “ethnopoetic,” a term that encompasses several imperatives—among them, the mission to reclaim the ethnographic gaze that has dominated the representation of indigenous cultures and to bring the indirection of poetry to an exploration of Native identity both past and present.– Dennis Lim, Artforum (March 2017)
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