Memory Traces: Artists Transform the Archive

Group exhibition, La Jolla Historical Society, 2022

Memory Traces: Artists Transform the Archive uses the La Jolla Historical Society’s holdings to consider the archive in its traditional function and reimagine it for contemporary times. The exhibition features seven San Diego artists, working across mediums, whose practices investigate memory, history, and how meaning is created from fragments of the past. 

The exhibition draws its title from a 1925 essay by Sigmund Freud, in which he explored the way remembrance functions. Observing memory’s natural inconsistency, Freud used the term “memory trace” to signify a note or aid to maintaining a clearer picture of the past. The archive has been considered to function similarly; a collection of materials compiled over time, that together establish a kind of collective memory. And yet, we have come to understand that the archive is always assembled by individuals, canonized from a particular perspective and set of experiences. 

 Memory Traces operates from an understanding of the archive as unstable, and the impossibility for such records to represent an absolute “truth” about the past. The exhibition proposes that the archive’s value may, in fact, lie in its malleability. With projects informed by research in the La Jolla Historical Society’s collection, the artists in Memory Traces activate the archive with imaginative and diverse interpretations that affirm the importance of keeping memory alive.

Artists include Robert Andrade, Janelle Iglesias, Joshua Moreno, Shirin Towfiq, Allison Wiese, Chantal Wnuk, and Joe Yorty.