The project addresses FCG's structural precarity, and more generally the employment conditions of working in artist-run culture. Forest City is especially precarious since it is currently severely underfunded, and only receives funding adequate to employ a single staff member. 

I have developed a project, funded by the Canada Council, to hire a second external staff member who will be paid by my (artist-)grant but will provide grant-writing services for the gallery. The project is a recursively conceptual work: The work produces an administrative-artistic mise-en-abyme in which artistic production and its administrative preconditions recessively and consecutively pre-empt each other, undermining the division between the artwork and the institutional entity by which the artwork’s existence is made possible. If this application for funding is successful, my artwork, by way of the funding it receives, will be to hire someone else whose task (as the fulfilment of my artwork) will be to secure funding to support the gallery. Yet without the gallery, which produces the semiotic conventions necessary to frame my employment offer as an artwork, the perspective from which this can be perceived as an artwork does not exist. My artwork will produce the infrastructure necessary to reinforce the currently inadequate infrastructure at the gallery, while the gallery produces the infrastructure necessary to understand my gesture as an artwork. 

The work is a year-long part-time, 80 hrs/ month contract, and pays $21 / hour. Here is a link to the call for applicants that also gives more background on the project. I am writing to you because I am trying to find a qualified candidate to hire for the position. Can you recommend any of your recent grad students or local colleagues who might be looking for additional work? If so, please ask them to write to me about the project with a cv attached. Assets are someone who is critical-minded, has excellent writing skills, and has an understanding of the mandate of artist-run culture. We already circulated a proper call for applications, but the results were inadequate so we need to cast a bit wider net. I do hope for your help with this.

If pandemic events calm down, I also hope to visit London next year to talk about the project, and would love to collaborate with UWO to give an artist talk or studio visits. If you have any leads for setting that up, I would also be very interested to follow up on that, but I know that this is way ahead of the curve, so it’s probably better to wait until we even know if classes can be held in person before we even consider organizing visiting artists.

Regardless, I hope that you stay healthy, and hope to hear back from you soon,

Best,

Josh