Brett Lackie
Media Artist | Research-Creation | Digital Storytelling, Memory & Archives
Media Artist | Research-Creation | Digital Storytelling, Memory & Archives
Artist Statement
I am a media artist and researcher working across moving image, photography, sound, archival materials, and emerging digital technologies. My practice explores how memory, identity, and personal history are shaped by the ways images, voices, documents, and stories are preserved, mediated, and reinterpreted.
Much of my current work centres on family archives and the tension between historical evidence and technological reconstruction. I am particularly interested in how AI-mediated image and voice processes can create new forms of presence while raising questions of authenticity, consent, authorship, and representation.
Through research-creation, I combine archival inquiry with experimental media practice, using editing, sound, photography, synthetic media, and database-oriented approaches to examine how the past is encountered in the present. Rather than treating digital intervention as a neutral tool, I am interested in the interpretive and affective changes that occur when archival material is transformed.
My work moves between documentation and speculation, asking what is preserved, what is missing, and what new meanings emerge when the archive is revisited through contemporary media technologies.
Background
I am currently completing an MA in Cinema & Media Studies at York University, where my research-creation practice focuses on archives, memory, synthetic presence, and AI-mediated storytelling.
My current Major Research Project, Conversations Across Time, examines how AI-mediated archival processes reshape affective, ethical, and interpretive experiences of familial memory. The project brings together family photographs, documents, recorded voices, historical research, and experimental moving-image production.
I completed a BFA in Media Arts at York University, where I developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning photography, video art, sound design, interactive media, and experimental storytelling.
Alongside my academic research, I have participated in collaborative exhibitions, independent media projects, curatorial initiatives, and multimedia production.
Influences
My practice is informed by artists and theorists whose work engages with memory, archival form, media technologies, and representation.
Susan Derges — camera-less photographic processes and material approaches to image-making.
Jean Baudrillard — simulation, hyperreality, and the instability of representation.
Bill Morrison — archival decay, material memory, and the temporal life of recorded images.
Hito Steyerl — digital image circulation, technological mediation, and questions of authenticity.
Marianne Hirsch — postmemory and the mediation of inherited histories.
Lev Manovich — database aesthetics, digital media structures, and new-media form.
Jacques Derrida — the archive as a site of preservation, authority, absence, and interpretation.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun — memory, digital media, habit, and technological temporality.
Exhibitions & Projects
My work spans research-creation, archival storytelling, photography, moving image, sound, and experimental digital media. Selected projects include:
Conversations Across Time — ongoing, 2026–27
A research-creation project examining AI-mediated archival processes, familial memory, synthetic presence, and ethical representation through the histories of Alfred John Doling and Lena Victoria Wiggins Doling.
The Secret Life of Lena Victoria Wiggins Doling — 2021
An archival storytelling project exploring the early life and history of Lena Victoria Wiggins Doling through family photographs, historical records, and inherited memory. The work considers how fragmented archival traces can be assembled and reinterpreted to construct narratives across time, place, and generations.
Ephemeral Beauty at the Family Cottage — 2024
A lumen-print series exploring nostalgia, place, ephemerality, and the passage of time through the material traces of a family landscape.
Pretty Hurts — 2023
A multimedia work examining beauty standards, self-image, and mediated representation through video, performance, and digital manipulation.
Purrfect Profiles — 2023
A photographic portrait series examining personality, observation, and visual storytelling through feline subjects, informed by the photographic legacy of Walter Chandoha.
For more projects and works in progress, explore my Portfolio.
Let’s Connect
I am interested in research-creation, experimental media, archival practice, digital storytelling, and emerging technologies. For project inquiries, collaborations, or academic work, please visit the Contact page or connect with me through the social links above.