About

Artist's Statement

In 1942, my grandfather's fishing boat, Brave, was confiscated by the Canadian government, along with the homes, businesses, and vessels of thousands of Japanese Canadians. Families were removed from the coast and dispersed inland, separated from the landscapes, communities, and livelihoods that had shaped their lives. My work begins with this rupture — but also with the question of what survives.

I am interested in how memory, identity, belonging, and ways of knowing persist when the structures that once sustained them have been removed. I explore how histories are carried forward through objects, landscapes, gestures, and acts of return, and how the past remains active within the present.

Working across installation, moving image, sound, sculpture, and archival forms, I create spaces where past and present remain in contact. A boat, a suitcase, a train line, a grave marker, a fragment of an archive — these become more than remnants of what was lost; they become vessels through which memory continues to unfold. My practice moves through landscape and material encounter rather than linear narrative. Meaning emerges through proximity, duration, attention, and relationship.

Many of my works involve acts of return: retracing routes of displacement, revisiting places marked by absence, and entering landscapes where histories remain embedded. The title Brave Against the Current describes this orientation — carrying memory, cultural knowledge, and presence forward against forces that would obscure, fragment, or erase them. These gestures are not attempts to restore what has disappeared, but invitations to consider how we carry inherited histories and find continuity within change.

Since 2018, I have worked as a facilitator with Art Cart at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, an institution whose history extends back to the Provincial Lunatic Asylum founded in 1850. Working within a place shaped by both care and confinement has deepened my understanding of how institutions hold memory, how histories are preserved or obscured, and how art can create spaces for encounter.

I live with neurodiversity. These questions are not approached from a distance; they are part of how I experience and navigate the world.

While rooted in Japanese Canadian histories of dispossession, my practice extends into wider questions of migration, displacement, neurodiversity, and cultural continuity. I am interested in what is carried across generations through memory, intuition, landscape, and lived experience — and in creating spaces where what has been hidden, overlooked, or displaced can once again enter into relationship.

About the Artist

Laura Shintani is a Japanese Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto, working across film, installation, sculpture, participatory practice, and archival form. Her work explores what survives when continuity is broken, creating spaces where past and present remain in contact and where memory, identity, and belonging are carried across generations.

In 1942, her grandfather’s fishing boat, Brave, was confiscated by the Canadian government during the wartime dispossession of Japanese Canadians. Her practice begins with that rupture and extends outward through material traces—a boat, a suitcase, a train line, a grave marker—to examine displacement, cultural continuity, and the ways histories are navigated, carried, and transformed over time.

Her projects emerge through acts of walking, carrying, gathering, folding, tracing, and return. Working with landscapes, archives, and objects as active sites of memory, she approaches history not as a fixed narrative but as an ongoing process shaped by movement, adaptation, and repair.

Since 2018, Shintani has worked as a facilitator with Art Cart, an arts program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. The institution’s layered history has informed her understanding of how art can exist within spaces shaped by both care and confinement.

Shintani’s work has been presented in galleries, museums, public spaces, and community contexts in Canada and internationally, including exhibitions in Italy and China.