The Speed Art Museum is proud to present a new exhibition of work by artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka (born 1984 in Ferndale, WA) as the inaugural iteration of the museum’s Current Speed exhibition series.

A 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Sky Hopinka (born 1984) makes experimental films, videos, and photographs that center and explore Indigenous perspectives, memory, and culture. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Hopinka interweaves personal and communal histories and experiences as visual, linguistic, and sonic ingredients to create an alternative form of storytelling that is often unfixed, inexact, and indirect. Through technical mastery and precision in film editing, the artist destabilizes and untethers our conventional linear viewing experiences—creating uncertainty that might mirror the myriad ways generations of Indigenous peoples have also been disenfranchised from their own firmly planted lands, homes, and familial ties to culture, identity, and personhood.

For this installation, the Speed will present three major film works made by Hopinka over the last six years: I’ll Remember You As You Were, not as What You’ll Become (2016), Lore (2019), and Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021). These fantastical, abstracted videos urge us to consider our own relationships to life, landscape, and memory as colorfully romantic, somewhat delirious contemplations assembled on both digital and 16mm film. Hopinka’s works sometimes veer towards experiments in evoking nostalgia, made more potent by intermittent threads of poetic text or historical prose. He is deeply invested in language as a cultural signifier and tool; his films sometimes feature words in Chinuk Wawa (an endangered pidgin “trade” language that originated in the Pacific Northwest in the 19th century) or Ho-Chunk. The artist has said “Indigenous art is the art of the indescribable things that you can’t think of in English. The meaning isn’t the shape of words, but rather it’s found in those crevices between the facts and the information we’ve been taught to understand of ourselves, those slick spaces where the spirit slips through that I don’t have the words for, that you don’t have the words for. All the things that surprise us—by not only our humanity, but the humanity of others.”