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{"id":146642,"date":"2019-09-01T07:37:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-01T12:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/?post_type=compte-rendu&p=146642"},"modified":"2026-01-14T11:10:03","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T16:10:03","slug":"life-of-a-craphead","status":"publish","type":"compte-rendu","link":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/life-of-a-craphead\/","title":{"rendered":"Life of a Craphead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
In Entertaining Every Second<\/em>, <\/em>Life of a Craphead\u2019s raucous yet poignantly confessional exhibition at Centre Clark, Amy Lam and Jon McCurley transform their trademark mastery of comic timing into an urgent and affecting exploration of intersectional histories both personal and geopolitical. Ceilings with Clowns, a minimalist bamboo-and-glass checkerboard-topped pavilion, showcases the duo\u2019s clever redeployment of the performative logic of first-generation conceptual titles to craft literalist punchlines aimed at the structures of institutional racism. The work ostensibly invites viewers to momentarily inhabit the subject position of female-identified labourers of Asian descent in the tech industry, whose professional progress continues to be halted by a formidable combination of so-called glass and bamboo ceilings. The clowns rollicking atop this otherwise austere counter-monument mock the white institutional voices that blocked Lam and McCurley\u2019s initial proposal to site the project in a mid-sized Canadian city famous for being a tech hub. Without diminishing the seriousness of the artists\u2019 message, this ludic gesture generates an unforgettable image.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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\"Life
Life of a Craphead
<\/strong>Find the U.S. Soldier Who Killed Your Grandma<\/em>, detail, 2018.
Photo : Paul Litherland, courtesy of the artists & Centre Clark, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Other works train this institution-critical gaze on more personal histories. In particular, Lam and McCurley\u2019s harrowing use of social media to identify and locate the now elderly killer of McCurley\u2019s grandmother, murdered in cold blood by American GIs during the Vietnam War. Originating as an implausible proposal for an app, Find the U.S. Soldier That Killed Your Grandma deftly engages the differential temporalities of personal and collective memory through the lens of what media historian Siegfried Zielinski has termed the \u201cdeep time of the media\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aa capacity to recognize the sometimes-startling contemporaneity of old technologies. In Lam and McCurley\u2019s haunting narrative, the transparency of smartphone screens unnervingly gives way to the opacity of yellowing court documents and ghostly crematoria.
The labyrinthine manhunt chronicled in gripping graphic novel format by Find the U.S. Soldier That Killed Your Grandma recalls the conventions of crime thrillers, thereby linking the work to an adjacent series of first-person text panels in which Lam turns her English-lit university education against the canon. Performing close readings of Graham Greene\u2019s The Quiet American<\/em>, the work draws attention to the book\u2019s demeaning representations of Phuong, an Asian woman relegated to performing menial and sexual tasks for Greene\u2019s American and British male protagonists. A related form of close reading propels Making Something Positive out of Chris Cran\u2019s Painting \u201cSelf-Portrait with Combat Nymphos of Saigon\u201d (1985), in which Lam and McCurley enact a ludicrous formalist edit of Cran\u2019s racially-fraught figurative canvas: the blank whiteness of the gallery walls exposed by the duo\u2019s \u201ccuts\u201d paradoxically reveals the otherwise occluded subjectivity of the white male painter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Probingly self-reflexive, Entertaining Every Second is compelling confirmation of Lam and McCurley\u2019s mastery of institution-critical messaging in a crowded media environment. Life of a Craphead\u2019s \u201csticky\u201d concepts and titles prove efficient but also durable carriers for complex histories.
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Adam Lauder, Amy Lam, Jon McCurley<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Centre Clark, Montr\u00e9al,<\/br>February, 28\u2013April 6, 2019<\/br>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":146639,"template":"","categories":[884],"numeros":[697],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[832],"artistes":[2021,2022],"thematiques":[],"type_compte-rendu":[],"class_list":["post-146642","compte-rendu","type-compte-rendu","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","numeros-97-appropriation-en","auteurs-adam-lauder","artistes-amy-lam-en","artistes-jon-mccurley-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu\/146642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/compte-rendu"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146642"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=146642"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=146642"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=146642"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=146642"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=146642"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=146642"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=146642"},{"taxonomy":"type_compte-rendu","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_compte-rendu?post=146642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}