Trying to Remember Everything, photomontage, 18.61 x 60 inches, 2024

Trying to Remember Everything was conceptualized as a billboard.

This work begins with personal, cultural and ancestral memories. An abandoned concrete mill near my childhood home was once the tallest building in the neighborhood. As teenagers, my friends and I used to sneak through a hole in the fence to hang out, spray-paint our worries on its walls, and smash things when we didn’t know what else to do. Years later, I returned to find the mill demolished. Its absence became a metaphor for how memory and history are preserved, forgotten, or erased. Now, the only trace that it ever existed lives on Google Maps.

This work is not really about the mill. It became a testament to the power of remembering without permission, hesitation, or fear of consequence. In my family, oral memory is a form of resistance: my great aunt still knows her great-grandmother’s name, despite never writing it down. It’s about the stories that disappeared the day my grandfather died. My Métis ancestors survive in Hudson’s Bay Company contracts and censuses. Their names survive in Hudson’s Bay Company contracts and censuses. Their worth is measured in labour, trade, distance from and proximity to whiteness.

Arts, culture, and daily life shape my memories. Proto-Iroquois ceramics relate to playing Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on a second-hand Nintendo 64. In the game, jars are smashed for loot. In real life, jars are artifacts in museums.  It makes me think about what we choose to protect, what we forget, and what we destroy without a second thought.

At its core, Trying to Remember Everything is a rebellion against erasure.