Lauren Warrington, On Tracing Memory, 2025. Install image, Art Museum, University of Toronto.
On Tracing Memory is an attempt to remember, re-remember, and locate an always shifting origin. It reflects on inherited memories, those not experienced firsthand but received in fragments through photographs, stories, and gestures. Working across digital and physical space, I consider memories of the matriarchs in my family who remained in Guangdong during the Chinese head tax (1885) and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1923)— histories of women largely unaccounted for in formal archives.Reckoning with the sparse information that remains, I turn to accounts from my family and look to embodied knowledge as a form of archive, re-materializing ephemera from a space of speculative memory. As this act of replication resists erasure, it intervenes in traditional modes of historical documentation, challenging notions of authenticity and the value of the original.
Photos by Toni Hafkenscheid
Lauren Warrington, On Tracing Memory, 2025. Install image courtesy of Toni Hafkenscheild.
Lauren Warrington is an artist and researcher living between Saskatoon and Toronto, who works with digital and physical space. Her practice is grounded in her experiences as a “mixed-race” Chinese Canadian on the prairies and engages the complexities of how cultural memory is created and the possibilities of its recontextualization through digital space and physical forms. She is interested in how technological and material systems can articulate diasporic subjectivities, functioning as repositories and mediums through which identity is negotiated and expressed.
Lauren is also a founding member of Biofeedback Collective, a three member artist collective focused on creating programming for underrepresented and emerging artists.