Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
To: Jonathan Middleton <████████ @artmetropole.com>
dear Jonathan,
I hope you are doing well. I look forward to Tuesday's event with Ben!
I am writing because I am looking for a publisher.
I am currently about mid-way through a year-long project entitled The Employee.
The project is a Canada-Council funded work, in which I have designated the majority of my grant to hire a contract worker whose task is to write funding applications and fundraise on behalf of the Forest City Gallery, one of Canada's oldest ARCs, and one with a history of advocacy for the payment of artists fees. Yet FCG runs its entire operation with a sole paid employee. By hiring someone to take on grant-writing and fundraising, The work is both a performance, enacted by Camille-Zoë Valcourt Synnott, and the contribution of useful and needed work to the gallery operations. Any money successfully acquired through the work will be incorporated into the gallery's budget.
The project addresses the labour required to finance artistic infrastructure, positioning fundraising labour as both intrinsically necessary, and somehow always subsidiary.
In addition to any funding raised and incorporated into the operations of FCG, the other outcome of the project will be a publication.
I foresee it as both an archive of primary documents (funding applications, money transfers, contracts, transcriptions of meetings, scans of the employee's notes, photographs of the work's performance), and a selection of texts and interviews about the project (confirmed contributors include: Marina Vishmidt, Clive Robertson, Denise Ryner, Mitchel Cumming, and Teresa Carlesimo, currently the employee/director of FCG and CARFAC Ontario co-chair).
I am seeking a publisher / distributor for this project, and Art Met seems like a natural fit. Would this perhaps be of interest?
I look forward to hearing from you,
my best,
Josh