Horizon Poems

Sky Hopinka (b. 1984, Ferndale, Washington) is a Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño. His work navigates landscape and language through mesmerizing, impressionistic videos. The narrators in his films speak about belonging, friendship, and kinship to ruminate on the ways that memories are shared and linger over time.

Cursive lines cross the horizon in Fainting Spells (2018), recounting his imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant, used by the Ho-Chunk to revive people who’ve fainted. Hands arrange and rearrange a collage of transparent color photographs on an overhead projector in Lore (2019) while a narrator tells stories of people, places, and memories. When you’re lost in the rain (2018) draws from Bob Dylan’s song “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” about Juárez, Mexico. The film features text and two overlapping narrators drawn across blurred moving images of mountains, roadways, and, briefly, labor protestors in a civic building. One narrator tells their many-layered story of growing up in the US while the other reads Walt Whitman’s poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”, an uneasy negotiation between the North American pioneer spirit and those who were here before.

Organized by Melanie Kress, High Line Art Associate Curator.