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 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.