Sky Hopinka: Fainting Spells, Gallery Guide

GA LLERY G U I D E

Fainting Spells, 2018, HD video (10:45 min) Sky Hopinka’s short film Fainting Spells is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska (or the Indian pipe plant) a medicinal plant used by the Wisconsin Ho-Chunk as a smudge to revive those who have fainted.

The film opens with a question – a direct address asking someone to tell them the story of Xąwįska. While Hopinka and his family were familiar with the traditional use of the plant, its origin remained a mystery. In response, the artist created Fainting Spells as a visual means to search for and process the creation myth of Xąwįska. Known by many names including Indian pipe, ghost flower, corpse plant, or its scientific designation monotropa uniflora, this traditional, homeopathic botanical is emblematic of Indigenous knowledge and cultural identity.

Fainting Spells begins with handwritten script that moves across scenes of expansive landscape. Music, text, audio, and imagery are collaged together by Hopinka to form a dreamlike narrative that characterizes the artist’s distinctive cinematic language. A cloaked figure, Xąwįska personified, leads viewers on a “walk through the spirit world” as the plant transports them through different states of consciousness and being.

When you’re lost in the rain, 2018, HD video (5:05 min) Sky Hopinka considers experiences of loss and longing interwoven with images of the landscape in When you’re lost in the rain. The film takes its title from a line in the Bob Dylan song “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, in which a stranger wanders through Juarez, Mexico, contemplating his misadventures in poverty, sickness, and despair.

As in the song, Hopinka’s film conveys notions of listlessness and exhaustion, moving between scenes that evoke the discontent and uncertainty of colonialism’s legacy, and the strangeness of the American pioneer spirit.

Both of Sky Hopinka’s short films include the near extinct Indigenous language, Chinuk Wawa which, when layered with fleeting images, sound, and movement, creates an intertwined and poetic visual language. Hopinka, who is fluent in Chinuk Wawa, has been an active practitioner in its revival in the Pacific Northwest. In his films, the artist’s emphasis of language—entwined with movement, memory, and imagination—acts as sacred conveyer of Indigenous homeland and identity.

— Heather Ferrell, Curator and Director of Exhibitions

BIOGRAPHY Sky Hopinka is a video artist, filmmaker, and teacher of Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the lower Columbia River Basin. A Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Hopinka has had his work screened at festivals and venues including Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Projections, New York Film Festival; Sundance Film Festival; 2017 Whitney Biennial; 2018 FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; and at festivals in Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Spain, among other countries.

Honors include an Art Matters Artist Fellowship; Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellowship; Filmmaker Magazine 25 New Faces of Film, 2018; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow, Harvard University; Jury Award, 2018 Chicago Underground Film Festival; 2017 Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists, among others. Hopinka received a BA, Portland State University, and an MFA, University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee. He is represented by Broadway, New York.

When you’re lost in the rain was commissioned by Brianna Matzke for The Response Project, 2018.

When you’re lost in the rain and Fainting Spells are Courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Artist.

Image copyright of the Artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Sky Hopinka: Fainting Spells is sponsored in part by The Maslow Family Foundation and Leunig’s Bistro & Café. Hospitality sponsors, Lake Champlain Chocolates, Farrell Distributing, and Prophecy Wines.

Burlington City Arts is supported in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts through the New England Arts Resilience Fund, part of the United States Regional Arts Resilience Fund, an initiative of the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with major funding from the federal CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan Act from the National Endowment for the Arts, and by The Vermont Arts Council & the National Endowment for the Arts.

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