The work s in Memory Traces activate the La Jolla Historical Society’s archive with imaginative and diverse interpretations that affirm the fluid relationship between past and present.įeatured artists include: Allison Wiese, Chantal Wnuk, Janelle Iglesias, Joe Yorty, Joshua Moreno, Robert Andrade and Shirin Towfiq.įunding for this project generously provided by the Sandy and Dave Erickson, Bo and Anita Hedfors, and the Florence Riford La Jolla Community Fund at the San Diego Foundation. It can be a site for critique, for expanding understandings of experience and of history, for transformation, and the creation of new narratives. The exhibition proposes that the archives’ contemporary value may, in fact, lie in its malleability. Memory Traces operates from an understanding of memory, and the archive, as unstable, and the impossibility for such records to represent an absolute “truth” about the past. And yet, we have increasingly come to understand that the archive is always assembled by individuals, canonized from a particular perspective and set of experiences. Together, these materials -or memory traces- establish a kind of collective memory. An archive has, traditionally, been considered to function similarly it is a collection of materials, compiled over time, thought to constitute an accurate representation of history.

Observing memory’s natural inconsistency, Freud used the term “memory trace” to signify a note made to serve as a future reminder, an aid to maintaining a clearer picture of the past. The exhibition draws its title from a 1925 essay by Sigmund Freud, in which he explored the way remembrance functions. Their resulting projects will be installed in the galleries alongside this source material. These artists mined the Society’s archive of photographs, ephemera, and objects, and selected material to take as a point of departure for making new work.

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. 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.

Dave erickson painting