FASTWÜRMS

DONKY@NINJA@WITCH is a visual cacophony of cliches and colour coated icons related to Witchcraft and run through popular culture. The legendary Canadian collaborative art Witches, FASTWÜRMS take ancient symbols like the pentagram, and apply a punk do-it-yourself sensibility to them, treating them more as ephemera than ritual objects. In their last video, they pit Witches and Ninjas against each other in the dark and abandoned night streets of Venice. There is a chase and final stand-off between two powerful cultural cliches of midnight evil. In the end, they come together as black collar workers of the night. The mix of styles, genres, subcultures, and identities is common in all of FASTWÜRMS’ installations. They specialize in brewing very particular concoctions, conflating aesthetics and symbols, colourfully mixing metaphors, awkwardly clashin stereotypes, and jumbling iconographies.

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present FASTWÜRMS’ first solo exhibition in Vancouver DONKY@NINJA@WITCH, which is an assortment of several of FASTWÜRMS’ installations, dating back from the late 1990s to 2005. The show includes a new video installation, give-away posters, wall murals, mirror paintings, and over a hundred other new details. This particular mixture includes a collection of elements from Swag & Shag, 1995; Unisex: House of Bangs, 1999; Blook & Swash, 2002; Denim Pox, 2002; Pirate Head, 2004; and Blood Clock, 2005. For their re-articulation of DONKY@NINJA@WITCH at CAG, FASTWÜRMS will continue refining their aesthetic and conceptual blend by further blurring separate installations, collapsing timelines and overlapping formal elements.

Biography

For over thirty years, FASTWÜRMS have moved from film to sculpture to installation, producing large public commissions, and recently participating in the 2006 São Paulo Biennial. They have produced solo projects at the Art Gallery of York University, North York (2007); Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto (2006); the late Zsa Zsa Gallery (2004); and they have exhibited internationally at Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco (1998) and Osaka 90 (1990). Recent group exhibitions include Anthem, Carleton University, Ottawa (2007) and Flag, poster intervention, Venice (2007).