Jon McCurley

Double Double Land Land
with Zoe Barcza, Xenia Benivolski, Miles Collyer, Robin Fry, Matt King, Amy Lam, Cameron Lee, Bonny Poon, Sarah Richardson

Live performance — one night only!
Thursday, January 8, 2009, 8:00 pm

Exhibition runs:
January 17 – February 14, 2009

Opening reception:
Saturday, January 17, 2009, 2:00 – 5:00 pm

Live demonstrations at Gallery TPW:

January 24, 12:00 – 5:00 pm
January 31, 12:00 – 5:00 pm
February 7, 12:00 – 5:00 pm
February 14, 12:00 – 5:00 pm

Double Double Land Land is both a play written and directed by emerging artist Jon McCurley and an experiment in collaborative exhibition. Through a one-night live performance and responding exhibition, Double Double Land Land takes on a culture of fear and doubt, proposing a hopeful Revolution of Use towards productive mediocrity. With performance-demonstration, video projection, installation, theatre and set design, McCurley leads a team of collaborators to redefine the concept of quality, to create something out of nothing, and to liberate the counter productive as, in fact, productive. In Double Double Land, the Minister of Tourism builds the land’s best tourist attraction — a big spring that launches you right out of town; the mayor reinvents ‘hard work’ as hiding in a black cube and not thinking (because it’s the hardest thing to do); a poor inventor builds an Opposite Progress Machine that doesn’t do anything and is such a success he gets rich.

Double Double Land Land is a co-presentation with The Theatre Centre (www.theatrecentre.org) and part of You Had to be There — Gallery TPW’s event series looking at the relation between liveness and images.

Artist Biography

Jon McCurley is an artist/performer who has been organizing large scale theatre nights in abandoned buildings around Toronto as well as regularly performing and presenting at Toronto’s Extermination Music nights. He is part of the collaborative duo Life of a Craphead with Amy Lam, who perform high concept comedy, and puts on the No Face No Problem Performance/Reading Show with Laura McCoy. Life of a Craphead were included in the exhibition series Toronto Free Library at the Toronto Free Gallery in 2008 and Double Double Land Land will be McCurley’s 8th staged play.