Invitation: Means of Production: The Employee

Workshop — The Employee

Means of Production:
The Employee
June 5, 2021, Noon PDT 

Join Fillip and artists Joshua Schwebel, Teresa Carlesimo, and Camille-Zoé Valcourt Synnott on Saturday, June 5, at noon PDT for a free, online Means of Production workshop focussing on Schwebel’s project, The Employee.

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The Employee is both a one-year employment contract and an artwork contributing to the structural support of the Forest City Gallery, London, Ontario. 

For The Employee, conceptual artist Joshua Schwebel hired a grant-writer to write funding applications on behalf of the Forest City Gallery. One of Canada’s first artist-run centres, Forest City Gallery has been publicly funded for almost fifty years, yet is only able to support a single paid staff member, Teresa Carlesimo. The delegated set of tasks comprising the artist’s project are for the Employee, Camille-Zoé Valcourt Synnott, to source, prepare, and submit applications for additional financial support for the Forest City Gallery. These tasks are at once the durational performance of an artwork and productive work in support of the operations of the gallery—rendering visible the unseen work of the administrative-economic tasks associated with the financial survival of the gallery.

This event is organized in conjunction with the forthcoming release of Institutions by Artists: Volume 2 (Folio E).

About the Artists

Joshua Schwebel is a Canadian conceptual artist. His artistic work reconfigures administrative and bureaucratic forms to expose compromises between artistic and economic value systems, and to show how neoliberalism operates through contemporary art. Schwebel has participated in numerous residencies and exhibited his work both across Canada and internationally. Most recent solo exhibitions include Solvent, at Or Gallery in Vancouver (2019), and The Ground, at Kreuzberg Pavillon, Berlin (2019), as part of the shortlisted artists for the Berlin Art Prize. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include The Tenant, at Galerie Clark in Montreal, and Superimposition, at Galerie UQO in Gatineau.

Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott is an interdisciplinary artist from Québec, currently based in K’jipuktuk (Halifax, NS). She graduated from Concordia University in 2018 with a BFA in Print Media and Fibres & Material Practices and completed an MFA in Fine and Media Arts at NSCAD University in 2020. Her object-oriented and text-based work uses humour as an entry point to make her practice more accessible, while constantly challenging the preciousness of art spaces. Her performance works reflect on the value of the artist’s work, perceptions of productivity and where life and art meets. In the last year, she’s been developing a collaborative and curatorial practice with Louis-Charles Dionne and Jacinte Armstrong, using sculptural props, movement and performative instructions.

Teresa Carlesimo is an interdisciplinary artist and arts worker. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen's University where her research considers various systems of power, class and empire as integral to the analysis of environmental crisis. Her recent artwork explores labour, extractivism, and the urban built environment through large-scale immersive installations and video works. She is currently the Director of Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario and serves as Co-Chair of CARFAC Ontario.

The artist gratefully acknowledges support from the Canada Council for the Arts, without which this work would not be possible.

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Fillip gratefully acknowledges the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the City of Vancouver, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.

Image: From the series Inside Brunnenstrasse, 2017. Photograph by Anne Wesolek, an employee of the Berlin Arts Council, as part of a project entitled From the Aesthetics of Administration (Centrum, Berlin, 2017) initiated by Joshua Schwebel whereby funding administrators were invited to produce the exhibited artworks. Wesolek photographed the display of artworks within the Arts Council offices.