contacting Anna

To respond to the normalized precarity of publicly-funded cultural work, conceptual artist Joshua Schwebel hired a grant-writer whose task was to write funding applications on behalf of the Forest City gallery. The delegated set of tasks comprising the artist’s project were for the Employee, Camille-Zoé Valcourt Synnott, to source, prepare and submit applications for additional financial support for the Forest City Gallery. These tasks were 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 were to be incorporated into the gallery’s operating budget, and potentially used to augment its future workforce, however the project did not attain a single positive response to the funding applications submitted. The work externalized grant-writing and the administrative-economic tasks associated with the financial survival of a small regional gallery, rendering this unseen administrative work into a supplementary durational performance on the peripheries of the exhibition space.