Art Metropole

#15605

The Employee

Artist

Joshua Schwebel

Editor

Lauren Wetmore

Price

$40.00

Date

2025

Publisher

Art Metropole and Forest City Gallery

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

9781989010242

Size

15.2 × 29.9 cm

Length

300 pp

Genre

Contemporary Art, Available for Wholesale , Economics, Performance Art

Description

The Employee is a publication of critical texts and first-person testimonials by artists and cultural workers reflecting on the links between public funding, artistic commitment, and self-exploitation in their practices and labour contexts.

The book is edited by Joshua Schwebel and Lauren Wetmore and includes contributions by the editors, Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, Teresa Carlesimo, Bopha Chhay, Dana Kopel, Michelle Lacombe, Denise Ryner, Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott, and Marina Vishmidt, with graphic design by House9.

The Employee emerges from its namesake artwork, a conceptual project of institutional critique by Joshua Schwebel that took place at Forest City Gallery in London, ON (2020-2021). FCG is one of Canada’s first artist-run centres and 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 funding from the Canada Council for the Arts to hire a performer, delegated to write funding applications on behalf of FCG, as a structural and performative reflection on the ambivalent and extractive echoes between art, work, and reproductive labour. Ultimately, none of the employee’s grant applications were successful.

As a subsequent artistic gesture, a comprehensive archive of emails connected to The Employee can be seen at www.the-employee.com. This archive constitutes a trace of the artwork and documents the continuous administrative labour of communication involved in cultural work.

The Employee gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the European Union / Goethe-Institut.

Table of Contents:
Director’s Introduction by Teresa Carlesimo
Overcome Overwhelm by Lauren Wetmore
Artist Narrative by Joshua Schwebel
Reflections from the Employee by Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott
The Work of the Employee by Bopha Chhay
The Job by Michelle Lacombe
The Haunted ARC: A Conversation with Denise Ryner
There Is No Outside to the Institutionalization of Precarity in the Arts: Reflections on Joshua Schwebel’s The Employee by Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte
Who’s the Boss? by Dana Kopel
Disintermediation by Marina Vishmidt
Work Becomes Her by Joshua Schwebel
Documentation and Performance Stills

Pre-order. Arriving May 2025.

1. 
2. 
3.