Thin Spaces: the porous places between

Curated by Elwood Jimmy

With work by Christine De Vuono, Justine Langille, Kwentong Bayan Collective, and Sal(t) Collective

Which labours rendered invisible by modernity keep us afloat in times of crisis? How do we move with this moment to the next with care?

Between moments of transition exist thin spaces, areas that are both within and without, here and not-here, allowing for profound transformation to take place. These porous places break down arbitrary boundaries and carry with them both an invitation and potential for new ways of being to be built. Through textiles, ritual objects, photography, and auditory works, Thin Spaces explores multisensory ways of recalibrating our notion(s) of care for one another in between complex worlds, narratives, and experiences.

The featured artists delve into the politics of care work, transgender embodiment, and the grieving of ecological collapse.

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About the Curator: Elwood Jimmy

Elwood Jimmy is a learner, collaborator, writer, artist, facilitator, cultural manager, and gardener. He is originally from the Thunderchild First Nation, a Nêhiyaw community in the global north. For close to 20 years, he has played a leadership role in several art projects, collectives, and organizations locally and abroad.

Christine De Vuono

Christine De Vuono is a multimedia artist working with drawing, sculpture, collage, installation, and photography. The materials of each project are chosen specifically to engage viewers in new ways to examine societal norms and values. Her work utilizes antiquated practices and mindful labour, emphasizing the disparity between past traditions and present efficiencies. Often focusing on the transitions we face in life, her work celebrates the needs of the psyche for beloved care and lived beauty. De Vuono’s work has been shown in London, UK, the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, Toronto, Winnipeg, Ottawa, in her home town of Guelph, and in online forums. She completed a Masters of Fine Art at the University of Waterloo, a Bachelors of Arts (With Distinction) in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and has previously studied at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Craven College in the United Kingdom.

Justine Langille

Justine Langille (they/them) is a queer-trans settler visual artist creating photography and drawing on Coast Salish Territories, in the place also known as Langley, British Columbia today.

They integrate documentary and family photography methods with foraging and improvisational techniques to mediate their personal relationships with development, destruction and stewardship. Their early photography explored social locations of environmental precarity throughout post-industrial southern Ontario landscapes. They are currently creating new work examining the broader queer ecologies that exist beyond Metro Vancouver in British Columbia. In 2023, they mentored with Christina de Middel of Magnum Photos.

Their work has recently been featured by The Dali Museum, Vancouver New Music, Emily Carr University of Art and Design and the City of Vancouver’s Community Placemaking Program.

Kwentong Bayan Collective

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.

For 2025-2026, Kwentong Bayan Collective are participating in the Eastern Comma Artists-in-Residence Program, an initiative of the Musagetes Foundation that has its roots in a long-time programming relationship with the rare Charitable Research Reserve.

KBC’s comic on the history of the Live-in Caregiver Program was published in the award-winning book, Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working Class Struggle .

KBC created a Visual Timeline of Caregiving Work in Canada poster that examines the 150+ year history of care work by indigenous and racialized women. Subsequently, this work has been published in textbooks, taught in high schools, colleges and universities, and presented at galleries in Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton, and Noisel, France.

Website: lcpcomicbook.com

Sal(t) Collective

Sal(t) Collective includes members Azul Carolina Duque and Kyra Royo Fay.

Azul Carolina Duque: was born and raised in Colombia, between the Andes mountains and the Pacific coast of Latin America, Azul plays and learns through the art-life practices of music composition, clowning, facilitation, grief-tending, and performance. As a former member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, she is drawn to the questions that surface as modern certainties fray, and to the forms of care, presence, and honesty needed in collapsing times. She holds a Master’s degree in Society, Culture, Politics and Education from the University of British Columbia.

Kyra Royo Fay: is a Filipina-American multi-undisciplinary artist, educator, and facilitator living on the unceded territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Nations. Born and raised in the archipelago of Indonesia, her work is shaped by the textures of diasporic identity, ecological kinship, and ancestral entanglement. She is deeply committed to water as connective tissue, land as kin, and art as a way to host tensions that don’t necessarily resolve, but instead open space for complexity, grief, love, and contradictory truths to coexist. Her practice spans performance, visual arts and arts-based facilitation, often grounded in community settings and land based inquiry.

Public programming

Opening Reception | May 8, 2026, 6:30 – 8:30 pm | Celebrate the opening of Thin Spaces , complete with a participatory writing activation of Christine De Vuono ‘s You’re Invited , led by the artist.

Soanación: Voice as living relation | May 28, 2026, 6 – 8 pm | This event is informed by the art-life practices of music composition, clowning, and grief-tending of facilitator Azul Duque, and invites participants into a somatic and artistic exploration through breath, vibration, and deep listening. Together, we will explore sound as a vibrational membrane that holds memory, receives the touch of territory, and remembers songs, bodies, and land as living relation.

Cyanotype Printmaking with Kwentong Bayan Collective | July 25, 2026, 1 – 4 pm | Spend a fun afternoon making cyanotype prints using found objects and light! Ages 12+.

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

Top image: Christine De Vuono, Scrubs (detail), 2023.

Sliding images:

1. Sal(t) Collective, TBD (detail), 2026. Photo: Sal(t) Collective.

2. Justine Langille, NO SPOONS OUT HERE (detail), 2025. Photo: Justine Langille.

3. Christine De Vuono, Scrubs (detail), 2023. Image courtesy the artist.

4. Kwentong Bayan Collective, Bayan, 2016. A Space Gallery. Photo: KBC.

WAHC thanks the Musagetes Foundation for their support of Thin Spaces: the porous places between .

WAHC acknowledges 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.