Sky Hopinka: Lore Opens June 7
About the event
“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, 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 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.”