About this Project

The Employee was a year-long performance project that took place from Sept. 15, 2020 until Oct. 15, 2021. The work responded to the staffing conditions of the Forest City Gallery artist-run centre in London, Ontario, the operations of which are managed by a single staff member paid part-time hours. This operational deficit implicitly demands constant unpaid overtime to maintain the gallery's administration, funding, communications, and programming. 

Schwebel’s artistic work was to shift this structural lack into visibility, by obtaining arts funding and then contracting a supplementary worker to perform as a grant-writer on behalf of the gallery, applying his funding to pay for this work. The projected outcome of the work was potentially to increase the centre's operating budget such that they would be able to hire an additional staff member. This goal was not achieved. The performance of grant-writing was enacted by Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott. The Employee financed and documented a year of funding applications written by the hiree on behalf of the Forest City Gallery. 

The Employee was funded by a grant from The Canada Council for the Arts. A printed publication of critical texts and first-person testimonials by artists and cultural workers reflecting on the links between public funding, artistic commitment, and self-exploitation in their practices and labour contexts, also entitled The Employee, is available for sale at Art Metropole.

About the Artist

Joshua Schwebel's artistic practice stems from a deep need to understand the world through applied questions, coupled with an uninhibited allergy to authority. He does exhibit and publish his work internationally and within Canada with a variety of non-commercial structures, but these engagements are not the benchmarks of his practice. He sustains his relationship with art through a concern for the world as it could be, and in conversation with the work of others who need to engage with the world in similar ways.

Contributors