Labour Pains

Presenting work by Camila Salcedo, Peter Morin, and Sean Lee with Birdie Gerhl, Labour Pains looks at major themes that many workers face while attempting to navigate healthcare in this country: privatization and financial strain of freelance employment; Indigenous relations to healthcare and living outside of urban centres; and disability, accessibility, and Crip Politics.

Labour Pains explores how healthcare impacts and affects precarious workers with varying needs, access points, and abilities. This exhibition and accompanying programming take up healthcare as a labour rights issue. It pertains especially to artists or to those whose body is the necessary tool for the creation, production, and dissemination of their work. It asks what are the challenges workers of this nature face while seeking care and how do they in turn find avenues of support within their own communities?

Co-presented with the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre.

Emma Steen is a Toronto based curator and writer. She received her BA at NSCAD University in Halifax, NS and then went on to complete a Masters of Art History at OCAD University in Toronto. Her area of interest lies in art and writing that explores intimacies, bodies, and gathering. Her background includes extensive work in community arts organizing, arts administration, and supporting methods of institutional accountability. As a curator, she has worked on multiple public art projects, with galleries, and in digital spaces. Growing up in Toronto’s downtown core has influenced her approach to curating and the importance of public art as a means of access to identity, placemaking, and feeling responsible, cared for and involved in the extended communities we are a part of.

Camila Salcedo is a Venezuelan-born interdisciplinary artist currently based in Toronto working primarily in textiles, performance, digital art, curation and community arts. They graduated from NSCAD University in 2018 with a BFA Interdisciplinary. They have shown their work at various galleries and festivals throughout Canada including Eyelevel Artist-Run Centre, Articule, Nocturne, Xpace Cultural Centre, Images Festival, Sur Gallery, Trinity Square Video, among others. Internationally, they have shown their work at the Gallery of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, and Proyecto ACE in Argentina. They have done a number of artist residencies in Latin America including Arquetopia and The Lab Program in Mexico, Residencia Corazón in Argentina, and Arquetopia in Peru, as well as in Canada, through Harbourfront Centre and the Toronto Public Library.

Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. Morin’s artistic offerings can be organized around four themes: articulating Land/Knowing, articulating Indigenous Grief/Loss, articulating Community Knowing, and understanding the Creative Agency/Power of the Indigenous body. The work takes place in galleries, in community, in collaboration, and on the land. All of the work is informed by dreams, Ancestors, Family members, and Performance Art as a Research Methodology. Morin began art school in 1997, completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver in 2001 and his Masters in Fine Arts in 2010 at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. Initially trained in lithography, Morin’s artistic practice moves from Printmaking to Poetry to Beadwork to Installation to Drum Making to Performance Art. Peter is the son of Janelle Creyke (Crow Clan, Tahltan Nation) and Pierre Morin (French-Canadian). Throughout his exhibition and making history, Morin has focused upon his matrilineal inheritances in homage to the matriarchal structuring of the Tahltan Nation, and prioritizes Cross-Ancestral collaborations. Morin was long-listed for the Brink and Sobey Awards, in 2013 and 2014, respectively. In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. Peter Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and is the Graduate Program Director of the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design program at OCADU.

Sean Lee (he/they) is an artist and curator exploring the assertion of disability art as the last avant-garde. His methodology explores crip cultural practices as a means to resist normative idealities. Orienting towards a “crip horizon”, Sean’s practice explores the transformative possibilities of access aesthetics as an embodied politic that can desire the ways disability disrupts. Sean is currently the Director of Programming at Tangled Art + Disability. He holds a B.A. in Arts Management and Studio from UTSC. Sean is also an independent curator, lecturer, and advisor, adding his insights and perspectives to conversations across Canada, the US, and internationally. He has taught “Accessibility in Curating: A Framework” at NODE Curatorial Studies Online and the Hidden Project with Goethe Institut Shanghai. Sean serves on the board of the Toronto Arts Council and CARFAC Ontario, and is Chair of TAC’s Visual and Media Arts Committee, and is a member of the External Advisory Panel supporting the City of Toronto in the development of its next ten year culture plan, the Action Plan for Toronto’s Culture Sector.

Birdie Gerhl (she/her) is a practitioner of longing based in Hamilton, ON. Through her work as a multidisciplinary artist and zinester, Birdie locates disability and difference in relationship, understanding that relationships informed by disability, or crip kinship, can be chosen or blood, human or non-human, material or ancestral, and disabled or not. Birdie’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions and group screenings at Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Windsor-Essex, Centre[3], Hamilton Artists Inc. and Tangled Art + Disability. She was awarded the 2019 Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency and the 2021 Centre[3] Emerging Artist Residency. In 2024, Birdie was invited to work with Blackwood Gallery, OCAD University, Dundas Valley School of Art, and Art Gallery of Burlington.

The Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (WAHC) was started over 25 years ago by an ambitious and dynamic group of labour historians, artists, and union and community activists who saw a need for a community museum that could celebrate the history of workers and labour. Over the years, WAHC has expanded their vision of work to include both paid and unpaid work, and to be as inclusive as possible of the experiences and histories of the least visible work and workers. As a community museum and arts centre, WAHC offers a diverse array of exhibitions, workshops, educational programs, digital projects, and community events that explore perspectives in labour history, social justice, and contemporary labour issues. WAHC also has a permanent collection of artifacts that relate to labour history and workers’ experiences. The community museum brings together members of community, unions, local arts organizations, workers’ groups, and artists to share and celebrate the stories of working people.