“Un/Covering Memory” is an audio-visual composition built from the Polaris Cover Sessions, a series in which Canadian artists reinterpret songs from the country’s musical talent, through their own voices and histories. The work doesn’t reproduce those sessions but listens closely to how they bend, reshape and answer to the originals, following that conversation into sound and image.
This exhibition focuses on how a song is never neutral repetition: each cover shifts whose voice carries a piece of music and whose story it holds, reshaping what a community recalls and who gets to take part in that remembering. Sound and visuals layer recombine so that familiar material is heard and seen from a different angle. An homage to the originals, “Un/Covering Memory” asks what we hold onto and what we change when we make a song our own, and how musical memory stays alive when being altered.
This exhibition was presented as part of the 2026 CBC Polaris Music Prize Festival.