BUGS
dir. Life of a Craphead, 2015.
Canada, 74 min.
THURSDAY JULY 7 – 7:30 and 10:00 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY – Directors in person!
GET ADVANCE TICKETS HERE
BUGS (Life of a Craphead, 2015) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.
BUGS is the first feature-length by Canadian artist duo LIFE OF A CRAPHEAD (aka Amy Lam and Jon McCurley).
“Bugs is a satire about a bug society and its most successful family. The Bug Prime Minister, Shay (Gerry Campbell), has ruled the Bug Garden for many years and is finally, reluctantly, retiring. He’s chosen his niece, Gaston (Liz Peterson), to take over — but Gaston, who is plagued with ambitions to be the Bug Garden’s most respected politician-architect-filmmaker — is folding under the pressure. Dan is his other niece, but she’s a dreamer and can’t be trusted; she’s full of conflicting ideals and tries to act on all of them.
Shay goes to the Oracle for advice and they foretell that his family can’t be saved. Meanwhile, a government worker/aspiring comedian Sexy Bug (Glenn Macaulay) and his best friend Rob (Peter Kalyniuk) are sick of the Shay family’s rule. They plot to vandalize a monument being built to honour the family. From afar, the neighboring Bird Country celebrates another Bug political failure.
From the Bug Garden’s most sought-after awards, the “Fuck Me Awards,” to the Bug version of SNL, the story mines the absurdity of life within a patriarchal society obsessed with success. Produced on a shoestring with a large cast and crew of artists and comedians over the last 5 years, the Bug universe is set in the middle of the real world, creating multiple layers of reality that interact with each other — satirizing contemporary pop culture and politics in a wholly inventive way.”
BUGS will have its US premiere at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, then will crawl its way up and over to Spectacle Theater (appropriately) in the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Special thanks to Matthew Thurber and Antonia Kuo for making the screening possible.
Life of a Craphead is the collaboration of Amy Lam and Jon McCurley since 2006. Their work spans performance art, film, and curation. 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. Life of a Craphead also run and host the monthly performance art show Doored, which recently toured to Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam; Flux Factory in NYC; and the Lodge at LACA, Los Angeles. They performed frequently on live comedy shows including at Laugh Sabbath (Toronto) and UCB Theatre (L.A. & NYC) between 2006-09. Life of a Craphead have been artists-in-residence at the Macdowell Colony, U.S.; the Banff Centre, Canada; and Wunderbar, U.K.; and their work has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Art in America. They are Chinese and Vietnamese and live and work in Toronto, Canada.