Life of a Craphead (Canada) is the collaboration of Amy Lam and Jon McCurley. Their work spans performance art, film, and curation, using humour as a form of empathy. The name Life of a Craphead comes from the opening joke of their first collaboration, a live comedy routine they performed in 2006.
At Delfina Foundation, Life of a Craphead will be researching histories of colonialism in East and Southeast Asia for an ongoing touring exhibition and a new autobiographical video series.
Their most recent exhibition, Entertaining Every Second, toured across Canada in 2018-2019. The show is centred on a research project into Jon’s family’s experience of the American war in Vietnam. Other projects include King Edward VII Statue Floating Down the Don River (2017), where they dumped a life-size replica of a colonial statue into a Toronto river on a weekly basis for a month; The Life of a Craphead Fifty Year Retrospective, 2006-2056 (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2013), a fake career retrospective of all the work they will ever make; and Free Lunch (2007), a public, anonymously-advertised free lunch serving everything on the menu of a Chinese restaurant.
Life of a Craphead also organised and hosted the performance art show and online broadcast Doored from 2012–2017, which featured work by over 120 artists, and their first feature film Bugs (72 min., 2016), a satire about a bug society, screened across Canada and the U.S.
They have presented work at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam; Centre Clark, Montreal; Gallery TPW, Toronto; and others. Their work has been featured on the CBC, Vice, Art in America, New York Times, and Imposter.
With support from
Sobey Art Award Residencies Program
THEMATIC PROGRAMME
Performance as Process:
Season 4
RESIDENCY SEASON
Artists’ website
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Please note all artist-in-residence biographies are accurate at the time of their residency. For up-to-date bios please visit the artist’s website.