About
Life of a Craphead is the collaboration of Amy Lam and Jon McCurley. Their work spans performance art, film, and curation. The name “Life of a Craphead” comes from the opening joke of the very first live comedy routine they performed together in 2006. Amy is Chinese and Jon is Vietnamese-Irish and they live and work in Toronto, Canada.
Performance projects include The Life of a Craphead Fifty Year Retrospective, 2006-2056 (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2013), an fake career retrospective of all the work they will ever make; Double Double Land Land (Gallery TPW, Toronto, 2009), a play interrupted by a staged wedding; and Free Lunch (2007), a public, anonymously-advertised free lunch serving everything on the menu of a restaurant.
Their first feature film Bugs (72 min., 2016) has screened in Canada and the U.S., including at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; The Western Front, Vancouver; Parsons School for Design, NYC; The Khyber Centre for the Arts, Halifax; and S1, Portland, among others. Life of a Craphead also organized and hosted the popular performance art show and online broadcast Doored from 2012-2017, which featured work by over 120 artists.
Life of a Craphead have been artists-in-residence at the Macdowell Colony, U.S.; the Banff Centre, Canada; Department of Safety, Anacortes, U.S.; Wunderbar, U.K.; Struts/Faucet, Canada. They were longlisted for the 2018 Sobey Art Award.
Press / Publications:
- Review of Entertaining Every Second at Centre Clark on akimbo by Tammer El-Sheikh
- Interview on Humour and the Abject podcast, episode 101, March 2019
- Interview with Aliya Pabani on The Imposter podcast, June 1, 2018 episode: “Is Comedy Art?”
- CBC The Sunday Edition “A Colonial Era Statue Hits the Water…” and online “Dumping Statue in the Don River…”
- Canadian Art “Eddie and Me”, “Art in 2017: A View from Toronto”, and “White Supremacists Target Anti-Monument Performance”
- VICE “This Art Comedy Duo Dumped a Controversial Statue in a River”
- Toronto Star “King Edward, down the Don River without a paddle”
- Now Magazine “The 10 Best Art Shows of 2017”
- Preview of Bugs U.S. tour on The Creators Project, June 2016
- Feature about Bugs in Canadian Art, Feb. 2016
- Preview of Doored in Art in America, June 2015
- “Experimental Comedy Camp” feature in C Magazine, Spring 2015
- “Comedians and Stoics” feature in Canadian Art, July 2014
- Review of Fifty-Year Retrospective in Canadian Art, April 2013
- Fifty-Year Retrospective in the Globe and Mail, April 2013
- Essay about the Fifty-Year Retrospective by Steve Kado (pdf)
- Free Lunch in Commerce by Artists, ed. Luis Jacob, published by Art Metropole, 2011
- Life of a Craphead interviews Life of a Craphead, Hunter and Cook, 2010
- Interview in This Magazine, August 2009
Life of a Craphead thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support.
