Opening Reception and performance | Para Ayer/Due Yesterday and WIP: Survival and Dignity

Emily Power is president of Caroline Co-op, a housing co-op in Hamilton. In 2024, she led her tenant association in fundraising to purchase the apartment building from their landlord, the first example of a tenant-led, co-op conversion in the city’s history. She received the 2025 Co-op Housing Champion award from the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada for her efforts.

Huckleberry Point Collective pursues place-based creative projects that draw attention to the relationships, legacies, cultures, and potentials that — despite histories of violence, trauma and forgetting — continue to sustain us. Started by Simon Orpana, Matt McInnes, Nancy Bouchier and Rob Kristofferson, the Huckleberry Point Collective seeks to nurture projects that can recognize and strengthen community relationships based on principles of equity, sharing and sustainability.

Kwentong Bayan Collective (KBC) is a Toronto-based artist collective. Our artistic mandate is to explore a critical and intersectional approach to community-based art, labour, and education. In the Filipino language, “kwentong bayan” is the literal translation of “community stories.” A major part of KBC’s work is in collaboration with Filipino migrant care workers, who support Canadian families to care for children, elders, and those with complex medical needs.

Scarlett Gillespie a.k.a Jelena Vermilion is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and sex workers’ rights advocate based in Hamilton, Ontario. Through mixed media, theatre performances, archival research, and public history, her work explores themes of labour, survival, stigma, and resistance. Vermilion is the Executive Director of the Sex Workers’ Action Program (SWAP) Hamilton and has spent years documenting the hidden histories of sex workers in Canada. Her practice bridges academia, activism, and art, while centering lived experience, collective memory, and the voices of those too often erased from institutional narratives. Her work is a love letter to those who come before us and to those who remain.

For more information, please contact Ada Bierling, Interim Programming and Exhibitions Specialist, at (905) 522-3003 ex. 29 or ada@wahc-museum.ca.

Image credits:

Left: The Employee of the Month, and The Next One, and The Next One… (2024), Artcite, Window, Windsor, ON. Photo documentation by Jel Media.

Right: Founding Celebration Ribbon Cutting (2024), Caroline Co-op. Image courtesy of Emily Power.

Work In Progress is made possible through the Alfred & Joan Robertshaw Memorial Fund of the Hamilton Community Foundation, the Atkinson Foundation, and supporters of WAHC’s Legacy Fund.

WAHC wishes to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Hamilton, the Province of Ontario, the Canada Council for the Arts, CUPE National, Canada’s Building Trades Unions, OPSEU/SEFPO, the Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario, and Teamsters Local Union 879 for their support of our exhibitions and ancillary programs.