b'sky hopinkaTHE TWO-CHANNEL VIDEOinstallation Cloudlessthrough small samplings of space and hope.Blue Egress of Summer and four prints from the seriesIn dialogue with other works in the collection,The Land Describes Itself exemplify Sky Hopinkasnotably by Coco Fusco,Susan Hiller and Katiaexperimentation with visual and verbal languages andKameli, Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer speakshis interest in histories and their transmission. to the ways in which contemporary artists useHopinka filmed Cloudless Blue Egress of film to interrogate language, landscape and theSummer (2019) at Fort Marion (also called Castillo dehistories retained in places and archives in orderSan Marcos) in St. Augustine, Florida. Meditative andto counter or reframe dominant narratives.affective, the two-channel film incorporates imageryHopinka employed a layered process toof the site itself as well as stories about and drawingscreate the prints in The Land Describes Itself. Usingby the Native Americans who were imprisoned therean Eiko overhead projector to illuminate 35 mmduring the Seminole Wars of the 1830s and the Indianphoto transfers onto transparencies, HopinkaWars in the late 1880s. Fort Marion was also wherephotographs the resulting compositions, which he Captain Richard Pratt developed the form of forcedthen prints. Onto the surface of those prints heassimilation later adopted throughout the Unitedetches what he terms hesitantly descriptive short States in boarding schools.phrases and texts. The photographs were taken inIn Hopinkas words, Each section of the the Pacific Northwest, the western Southwest andvideo tells a small part of this history, from Seminolethe Great Lakes. The process of constructing these Chieftain Coacoochees account of his escape fromimages is also the subject of Hopinkas 2019 filmthe fort, to ledger drawings made by the prisonersLore in which the fragmented landscapes are as-from the plains given pen and paper and told to drawsembled on the projector in real time for the viewer, what they see and what they remember. Each sec- referring, in turn, to Hollis Framptons experimental tion traces the persistence of presence and memoryfilm, Nostalgia (1971).experienced through confinement and incarceration,Now a professor in Bard Colleges MFA pro-gram, Sky Hopinka earned his BA from PortlandState University and his MFA in film, video, animationand new genres from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. His work is in the permanent collectionsof the Anchorage Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center and theWhitney Museum, among others.Sky Hopinka. Ho-Chunk/Pechanga, born 1984. Cloudless BlueEgress of Summer, 2019. Two-channel video, 13 minutes, 15 seconds. Purchased with funds from the Contemporary Associates70'