Let me Get you an Orange!
Salon with Sean Lee, jes sachse and Parkdale Community Legal Services
Date & Time
Thursday May 16
6:30-8:30PM
Location
Workers Arts & Heritage Centre
51 Stuart St
Hamilton, ON
*Round trip GO Train fare provided to those traveling from Toronto. The Workers Arts & Heritage Centre is a 2 minute walk from West Harbour GO station. Bring your one way receipt to the event where Mayworks volunteers will reimburse you for a round trip fare.
This event is also taking place on Zoom. Registration on Eventbrite offers participants an in-person ticket and a Zoom link to join online.
Accessibility
ASL PROVIDED. This event will take place outdoors on a grassy surface. Masks required when indoors. WAHC is physically accessible for those who use mobility aids. All building floors are accessible via the elevator. Two gender neutral bathrooms in the basement have a physically accessible stall. You can also access more detailed accessibility info on WAHC’s website. For accessibility questions or requests, please email programming@mayworks.ca
Join us in an evening of oranges as we delve into the complexities of navigating the current ableist ecosystem of Ontario’s housing, where invisible labour is always already a part of the landscape.
As artist Sean Lee invites everyone into an orange peeling session, we will be joined by artist jes sachse who has faced a two and a half year eviction battle through the N12 process that has allowed a purchaser to buy a triplex with tenants residing inside and utilize the Landlord Tenant Board of Ontario to push them out.
Too in discussion will be Samuel Mason from Parkdale Community Legal Services, not only jes’ lawyer, but legal representation to many, who are both disenfranchised by the housing crisis at hand and served pro bono by accessing OW and ODSP. These are invaluable insights into legal protections in the context of renovictions, demovictions, and bad faith evictions and unlawful/unethical housing practices.
Through dialogue and practical support, jes will be sharing the institutional knowledge that they have acquired first hand from being in an over two year long battle while educating themselves in the process. But oranges are for everyone! We are interested in sharing other’s insights, as together we can better protect ourselves in the face of ableist housing practices in Toronto and beyond.
This salon is a part of Labour Pains group exhibition, curated by Emma Steen.
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.
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.