The Employee Book Launch with Joshua Schwebel, Lauren Wetmore, Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, and Bopha Chhay

Join Joshua Schwebel and Lauren Wetmore, co-editors of The Employee, for a book launch and discussion with contributors Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte and Bopha Chhay. Along with readings from the book, we will discuss how cultural work, artistic livelihoods, and arts funding intertwine with artist-run culture.

The Employee (2020-2021) was a year-long artwork by Joshua Schwebel at Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario. Expanding from this artwork, The Employee (Art Metropole and Forest City Gallery, 2025) is a publication of critical texts and first-person testimonials by artists and cultural workers reflecting on Schwebel’s practice and the contexts of their own labour.

The Employee 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.

ARTIST BIOS

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte is a cultural policy scholar with a creative practitioner background who specializes in the study of organizational and governance issues in the Canadian cultural sector. Mariane completed a PhD in Communication (2025) and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts (2012) at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Her PhD dissertation maps the history of artist-run centres in British Columbia in relation to evolving cultural governance processes and apparatuses at federal and provincial levels and within artist-run networks. She is presently Co-Director of the Archives in Action: Canadian Audiovisual Archives Policy project. Her research on Canadian cultural policy, artist-run organizations, and the intersections of digital technologies with arts management has been published in the Canadian Journal of Communication, ESSACHESS: Journal of Communication Studies, and various anthologies. Mariane has served on the board of directors of the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centres, VIVO Media Arts Centre, and Aphotic Theatre. She has worked as the lead consultant on various sectoral and community research projects commissioned by national and provincial arts service organizations including Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference (ARCA), Independent Media Arts Alliance (IMAA), Canadian Artists’ Representation/Front des artistes Canadiens (CARFAC), and Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec (RCAAQ). She has contributed to revising the CARFAC–RAAV and IMAA fee schedules and was responsible for developing IMAA’s Online Presentation Standards for Media Arts project.

Joshua Schwebel’s conceptual artwork exposes the inner workings of contemporary art through installations, interventions and video. Often departing from exchanges with people involved in facilitating work, Schwebel reflects on the nature of a structure that is both precarious and exploitative. Moving away from typical strategies of institutional critique, his practice offers vantage points to reimagine the cultural politics of financialization, as well as pathways beyond it. Schwebel’s work has been exhibited across Canada in solo and group exhibitions, as well as in international contexts.

Lauren Wetmore is a Canadian curator, writer, and editor based in Brussels. She is Director of Programs at Momus and co-host of Momus: The Podcast. Wetmore has contributed to exhibitions, biennials, and commissioning programs internationally including Frieze Projects London, the 2013 Carnegie International, and Mophradat’s Meeting Points 8. Her independent projects include Contact Tracing for Mudam Luxembourg, Basir Mahmood: I watch you do for Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels, and The Conversation for which she was awarded the Encura residency at Fundació Hangar Barcelona. She has also held positions at The Banff Centre and the Barbican Art Gallery. Wetmore’s writing has been included in After Laughter Comes Tears (Lenz Press), Post-Capital: A Reader (Mousse Publishing), These Are the Tools of the Present: Beirut–Cairo (Sternberg Press), Xavier Cha: abduct (MOCA Cleveland); and as a critic in Momus, MadaMasr, Spike Arts Quarterly, C Magazine, and others. Wetmore’s work has been supported by Creative Europe, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Goethe-Institut, the Flanders Arts Institute, and SSHRC. She holds an MFA in Criticism & Curatorial Practices from OCAD University and a BA with a double major in Art History and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies from the University of British Columbia.