For filmmaker and artist Sky Hopinka, there’s an art to telling a story. Hopinka’s unique form of storytelling is now on view at the museum in the exhibition “Lore,” which opened earlier this month. Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022 and he has continued to make new works that shed light on the power of story.
“Story can mean a lot of things, to a lot of different communities, to a lot of different peoples,” he said in one MacArthur Fellow video. “I think as humans, we search for stories in everything, as a way to understand, as a way to process.”
Working with moving image, written form and photography, Hopinka said he likes to find different ways that these forms intersect one another, whether in experimental film, documentary film, installation videos, photography or poetry.
“What I’m interested in doing is to look at a more circular form of storytelling,” he said, “or one that doesn’t necessarily have a beginning, middle and an end in the way that we’re accustomed to living in the culture that we live in right now.”
In his latest exhibition, on view at the museum, Hopinka uses his unconventional form of storytelling – using both visual and audio abstraction – to bring his perspective into focus for the audience.
“In this video work, images of friends and landscapes are cut, fragmented and reassembled on an overhead projector as hands guide their shape and construction. Meanwhile, a voice tells a story about a not too distant past, a not too distant ruin, with traces of nostalgia expressed in terms of lore. We see knowledge and memory passed down and shared not from wistful loss, but as a collage of rumination, reproduction and creation.”
His work is but one of many Indigenous voices ultimately, he noted.
“The more that I can be seen as one small part of a larger constellation of works and voices that make up Indigenous peoples in this country, the better,” he said. ”I hope that that these works will also instill a sense of curiosity for an audience that might not be familiar with Indigenous film, to see that there’s more out there than the things they might have encountered if they’ve encountered any of them at all.”
Learn more about Sky Hopinka’s work and come view his new exhibition at the museum in person. It’s on view until September 24.
Authored by:
Jessica Luton
