possible book launch

The Employee is a conceptual artwork by Joshua Schwebel that took place between September 2020 and October 2021 at Forest City Gallery, an artist-run centre in London, Ontario. As one of Canada’s first artist-run centres, FCG has been publicly funded for almost fifty years and operates on the labour of a sole staff member. Schwebel’s artwork established a one-year contract for grant-writing work as a performance on behalf of the gallery. By supplementing the insufficient work-force of the gallery, The Employee commented on the precarity of cultural work. 

This publication comprises critical texts that thematize the precarity of publicly-funded cultural labour, first-person testimonials from cultural workers, and thoughts on institutional critique within the creative economy.  It is intended to both reflect on and archive The Employee, and to trace the disintegration of boundaries between art-work-life leading up to, during and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic.

Contributor Dana Kopel describes the project as " a lens into the crumbling infrastructure of the regional gallery system and labour in the arts more broadly; it prompts consideration of the often-detrimental ways that contemporary art production relies on both corporate and corporatizing state funding models that exist primarily to serve the expansion and entrenchment of capital. In doing so, the work implicitly also poses the question: What can we, as art workers, do about it?”

The Employee is co-published by Art Metropole and Forest City Gallery. It is edited by Joshua Schwebel and Lauren Wetmore, and includes contributions by Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, Teresa Carlesimo, Bopha Chhay, Dana Kopel, Michelle Lacombe, Denise Ryner, Joshua Schwebel, Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott, Marina Vishmidt, and Lauren Wetmore. It is designed by House9 Design and copyedited by Jessica Anthony.