Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
To: The Employee <employee@forestcitygallery.com>, Kate Woolf <██████████████ >, Director - Forest City Gallery <director@forestcitygallery.com>
Cc: Jeff Khonsary <████ ██████████ >
Project Description:
The Employee is both a one-year employment contract and an artwork contributing to the structural support of the Forest City Gallery, an artist-run centre in London, Ontario, which, as one of Canada’s first artist-run centres, has been publicly funded for almost fifty years, yet only can support a single paid staff member.
Conceptual artist Joshua Schwebel has hired a grant-writer whose task is to write funding applications on behalf of the Forest City gallery. 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 at once the performance of an artwork and productive work in support of the operations of the gallery. Schwebel successfully obtained project funding from the Canada Council for the Arts to hire the Employee as a delegated performer of the artwork. Any funds successfully earned by way of the project will be incorporated into the gallery’s operating budget, and potentially used to augment its future workforce. The work externalizes grant-writing and the administrative-economic tasks associated with the financial survival of the gallery, rendering this unseen work into a supplementary durational performance enacted peripheral to the exhibition space.
Joshua Schwebel will discuss the project in conversation with Forest City Gallery's director, Teresa Carlesimo and with the Employee, Camille-Zoé Valcourt Synnott. The artist gratefully acknowledges support from the Canada Council for the Arts, without which this work would not be possible.
Joshua Schwebel Bio: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 Bio:Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott is an interdisciplinary artist from Québec (QC), 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 Bio:
Teresa Carlesimo is an interdisciplinary artist and arts worker, and 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.
