Welcome to The Employee email archive.
The Employee (2020-2021) was a year-long artwork by Joshua Schwebel that took place at Forest City Gallery (FCG) in London, Ontario. One of Canada's first artist-run centres, FCG has been publicly funded for almost 50 years, yet is staffed by a single, part-time employee whose disproportionate workload is not uncommon in the sector. To realize The Employee, Schwebel obtained a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to hire a performer, “the employee,” performed by artist Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott, who he delegated to write funding applications on behalf of FCG. With this protocol, Schwebel intended to reinforce FCG’s capacity, while the gallery provided a framework through which administrative activities would be signified as art. Ultimately, none of the employee’s grant applications were successful.
This archive is published in parallel with a printed publication of the same name, edited by Schwebel and Lauren Wetmore with contributions by the editors, Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, Teresa Carlesimo, Bopha Chhay, Dana Kopel, Michelle Lacombe, Denise Ryner, Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott, and Marina Vishmidt. The Employee is co-published by Art Metropole and FCG. The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, without which this project would not have occurred.
The archive constitutes a trace of the artwork and the publication, documenting the continuous administrative labour of communication involved in cultural work. It contains every email sent and received in connection to the project and throughout its duration. Redactions were made to respect peoples’ privacy, or to indicate correspondence with those who declined permission to include their emails in the archive.
Select an email thread to begin.
book-publication form: book with critical texts + website with project and email archive qr codes as link between publication and website
-presentation of textswebsite
-introduction Teresa (800 words)
-introduction Lauren (1500 words)
-artist's narrative (1500 - 2000 words)
-essays (order tbd): Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, Marina Vishmidt,█████████ █████ (TBC), Dana Kopel (TBC)
-project report (CVS, TC, and JS in conversation to debrief the project)
-format 6"x9"
-max. 30 colour images (tbd based on budget)
-acknowledgements
3. graphic design-project archive including project grant application, contracts, call for applicants, email correspondence (almost 1000 individual emails that took place throughout the project and including publication planning), transactions, application results