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

Social Practice, Contemporary Art, Available for Wholesale , Economics, Performance Art

The Employee was a year-long Conceptual artwork by Joshua Schwebel investigating how “artistic practice as we know it today is a sculptural form in itself, shaped by the constraining forces of policy and funding priorities confronting arts workers and artists.” The Employee took place at Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario from 2020-2021. 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 artist-run centres in Canada. To realize The Employee, Schwebel obtained funding from the Canada Council for the Arts to hire a performer, “the employee,” who he delegated to write funding applications on behalf of FCG. With this protocol Schwebel intended to reinforce the gallery’s capacity, while the gallery, in turn, provided the framework through which the performer’s administrative activities would be signified as art. Ultimately, none of the employee’s grant applications were successful.

This book, also The Employee, is a publication of critical texts and first-person testimonials by artists and cultural workers reflecting on Schwebel’s work and their own labour contexts. An online archive of the emails sent and received throughout the extent of the project (2018-2025) can be consulted at: the-employee.com. Parallel to this printed publication, this archive constitutes a trace of the artwork and characterizes the nature of cultural work as a continuous labour or network-building and communication.

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

Pre-order. Arriving May 2025.