JUPITER NIGHTS X FORGE PROJECT

JUPITER NIGHTS – Basilica Hudson’s new weekly series of arts events in its Gallery building – continues with a collaboration with Forge Project, a Native-led decolonial art and education initiative, May 26. 

At 6 PM, Inaugural 2021 Forge Fellow Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), an award-winning filmmaker and photographer, will join Forge Project executive director Candice Hopkins (Tlingit) for an in-depth conversation on his practice.

Following the conversation, Basilica will screen two of Sky Hopinka's films in its Gallery building (adjacent to the main building on campus).

Dislocation Blues
Total Run Time: 16:57
HD video, stereo, color
2017

An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Cleo Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become.

Fainting Spells
Total run time: 10:45
HD video, stereo, color
2018

Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, this is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant - used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted.

At 8 PM, acclaimed experimental musician and 2022 Forge Fellow Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) will perform as part of Basilica’s Jupiter Nights summer series. 

About Laura Ortman

A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Martha Colburn, and as part of the trio, In Defense of Memory. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, often sings through a megaphone. She is a producer of capacious field recordings.

Ortman has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, The Stone residency, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, The Toronto Biennial, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2008, She founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast. Ortman is the recipient of the 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room. Ortman was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

About Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, CA; Portland, OR; and Milwaukee, WI. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fictional forms of media. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and teaches at Bard College.

His work has screened at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images Festival, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial, the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2018 FRONT Triennial. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and was a part of Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. His work was awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018–2019 and Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, and was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.

About Candice Hopkins

Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explores the intersections of history, contemporary art, and indigeneity. She worked as senior curator for the 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art and was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma. She is co-curator of notable exhibitions including Art for New Understanding: Native Voices 1950s to Now; the 2018 SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa Tomada; documenta 14 in Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany; Sakahàn:

International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada and Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years in Winnipeg, MB. Her essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” for the documenta 14 Reader, “Outlawed Social Life” for South as a State of Mind, and “The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History)," for New Museum/MIT Press. In 2022 she was a recipient of the inaugural Noah Davis Prize, along with Thomas Lax and Jamillah James.

About Forge Project

Forge Project is a Native-led initiative centered on Indigenous art, decolonial education, and supporting leaders in culture, food security, and land justice. Located on the unceded homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok in Upstate New York, Forge Project works to upend political and social systems formed through generations of settler colonialism.

Launched in 2021, Forge Project serves the social and cultural landscape of shared communities through a funded fellowship program for Indigenous culture workers, including those working in food, land justice, law and decolonial governance, and artists, as well as public education and events, a lending art collection focused on works by Indigenous artists, and a teaching farm developed in partnership with Sky High Farm.

About Basilica Hudson

Housed in a solar powered, reclaimed 1880s industrial factory, Basilica Hudson, a nonprofit multidisciplinary art center located in Hudson NY, welcomes over 20,000 visitors each season to genre-pushing music festivals, large scale marketplace events, regular film screenings, an artist in residency program, public installations and other community gatherings. The majority of its programs are free or sliding scale.

Through its programs, Basilica Hudson supports the creation, production and presentation of independent arts and culture, and strives to forge experiences that aspire to the scale, grit and beauty of its surroundings. It draws inspiration for its mission and programming from the City of Hudson’s epic history, as well as the region’s artistic legacy and environmental advocacy.

Photos courtesy Thatcher Keats.