Sky Hopinka and Living Within the Play
Sky Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a Pechanga descendent. He was born and raised in Washington State and Southern California, and spent a number of years in Portland, Oregon and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin and first began making films. 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.
The Poor Farm exhibition features Hopinka’s videos from the past six years. The exhibition also premiers a new multi-channel installation, ma ɬini (Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore) 2019 and new photo and text-based work.
A publication designed by Nate Pyper will be released in the summer of 2020 and includes contributions by Almudena Escobar López, Sky Hopinka, Jackie Wang, Lindsay Nixon, Carl Bogner, Julie Niemi, John Riepenhoff, Michelle Grabner, and an interview between Sky Hopinka and Michael Rakowitz.
Hopinka was a recent fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and in 2019 he was a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow. His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, and Projections. It has been included in exhibitions at LACE, Disjecta, Counterpublic, the Whitney Biennial, and FRONT International. He currently teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C. and is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
A publication designed by Nate Pyper will accompany the exhibition and include contributions by Almudena Escobar López, Sky Hopinka, Carl Bogner, Jackie Wang, Michelle Grabner, John Riepenhoff, Julie Niemi, Michael Rakowitz among others.
LIVING WITHIN THE PLAY
The Poor Farm is also hosting a long-term research residency called Living Within the Play, exploring the contingent nature of hosting and gathering, the fleeting and the reverberating, particular to the moment of temporary, intentional assembly. Using the “artist residency,” a reliably liminal site, as a platform for inquiry and play and party - the Poor Farm becomes a “stage” or “playing field” that can collapse forms from daily life, the studio and the event to produce a living and working space that builds on the natural byproducts of this shared experience (responsiveness) towards a cumulative public occurrence (resonance). This project is coordinated by Mark Jeffrey (Chicago, IL), Kelly Kaczynski (Chicago, IL), Judith Leemann (Boston, MA), Kelly Lloyd (London, UK) and Shannon Stratton (Queens, NY).
The 2019 annual Lazy River Show Me Your Rafts, Yet Another Can Float featured a limited collectable koozie designed by Sarah Luther. Lazy River Radio will feature mixes by Joe Acri and Sally Nicholson. Experimental river apparel designed by Kirsten Schmid. Poor Store, operated by Sara Caron, returned to Poor farm grounds.
Microlights, programmed by Ben Balcom + Jesse McLean, is a Milwaukee based cinema that platforms contemporary film and video art. They presented an outdoor screening on the August 2nd. The full program will be posted to their website: microlightscinema.com.
2019's Summer School was presented by Julie Niemi alongside carbon copy, an artist-run collective currently composed of Brigette Borders, Danny Bredar, Nathan Engel, Ed Oh, Daniel Salamanca, WooJin Shin, and Ke Yi (Leah) Zheng. Carbon copy's core areas of focus include collective action, experimental spatial syntax, and the changing position of painting in the digital age.
Poor Farm is a not-for-profit project space that honors the tradition of artist-directed programs and supported by Christine Symchych, Jim McNulty, Miriam Van de Sype, Flavius Cucu, John McKinnon, The Green Gallery, John Riepenhoff’s Beer Endowment, George Bregar and Company Brewing.