H9 Meeting Notes: October 13, 2021

Hey, Josh,

Hope your week is off to a good start, even though it is kinda gloomy out. Thanks for our chats last week. As per H9 practice, I just wanted to share our meeting notes with you.

Also, just checking in: any thoughts on where you’d like to meet up with Farah and Louis this Wednesday?

All the best,

mark

Discussion:

• Two new projects

• The levels of support needed differ between the two projects

• One needs more H9 help than the other: The Employee

• Received funding in February 2020

• It is a conceptual artwork + performance

• The performance is a year long

• Critique of inadequate labour conditions in cultural production 

• In order to draw attention to the fact that people who work in artist-run spaces who are not paid for their work and are expected to work beyond what they’re paid, this project was done with an artist-run centre in London, Ontario (Forest City Gallery) that only has one single employe (Teresa Carlesimo)

• Josh was able to hire for a supplementary employee (Camille-Zoé Valcourt Synnott) whose tasks were to support this artist-run centre: applying for grants so that this centre could hire more people

• The project points to an absence or lack

• The project finished on October 13, 2021

• Josh has a year’s worth of documentation of this project

• Many “ugly” screenshots: bank transfers, applications, administrative online forms

• There are audio recordings of the meetings, but these haven’t been transcribed yet

• Will be inviting both employees to contribute essays

• Josh’s employee will do scans of notebooks

• There are hours of performance, aka the employee watching/working/doing stuff over Zoom

• There was also a photoshoot in the gallery, which was also live streamed.

• The whole thing is on a Google Drive that can be shared with H9

• Josh wants to create a timeline of the project that is annotated by 3 people (Joshua Schwebel, Camille-Zoé Valcourt Synnott, Teresa Carlesimo) 

• Open to suggestions for how to visualize this work

• It doesn’t need to be exhaustive, but adequate enough to show that the performance lasted for a year

• Art Metropole is set to publish this project

• We will be able to redact certain personal information (aka Camille’s mailing address), but the email account is okay (it was created for the work/performance)

• Thinking about ways to access the videos via the book (flipbooks of the Zoom performances?)

• References: Maria Eichhorn publications

Timeline:

• H9 would like to start working on this project at the beginning of 2022 (latest)

• Josh will be back in Quebec in April/May (Book launch the 20th of May?)

• Printing would have to be happening in mid-April, if not early April

Next steps for Josh:

• To give H9 access to Google Drive by mid-November

• Josh to provide an outline of who the writers are, how many essays there will be, how long the essays will be

• Production and design budgets by mid-November

• Follow-up meeting: November 16, 2021

Next steps for H9:

• Start prepping a timeline

• Follow-up meeting: November 16, 2021 

2nd Project: Postcards

• Double-publication that’s twined

• Printing 100 copies in total

• 2 essays

• Maybe H9 can work more in a consultative role

• Follow-up meeting IRL on October 20 (Farah, Louis, Josh)