FASTWURMS.

Sayej, Nadja

FASTWURMS by Nadja Sayej Art Gallery of York University, Toronto CANADA September 26 * December 9, 2007

Walking into a FASTWURMS exhibition is like entering a wig emporium. Or an outlet for Levi's. Maybe Home Depot having a garage sale. Or a storage facility for the set of Tim Burton's Nightmare before Christmas. Anything, basically, but an art exhibition. The only thing missing are the shopping carts.

It's the pegboard walls, really. Lining them like surplus merchandise are dozens of axes, pointy witches hats, braided weaves and dildos so clean they look almost pleasurably wet. But unlike any ordinary novelty store, "DONKY@NINJA@WITCH" has an unexpected twist: it's all a cover for pulp witchcraft. Ever since Salem, we know that Wicca has publicly hissed at naysayers of the "polymorphous and polycultural Avalon" (never mind the consumerist platform), so this kind of mall will likely have Cruella De Ville or the Wicked Witch of the West humming along to AC/DC as they stroll the cape-and-cauldron aisles, rather than, say, suburban soccer moms.

It's no accident that the work looks antsy: the Toronto/Creemore duo who make up FASTWURMS, Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse (who have trod the Canadian boards for 27 years), show installations and performances that were once exhibited in storefronts along Toronto's formerly grungy, now glossy Queen Street West art district. "DONKY@NINJA@WITCH" continues in the same witch-meets-queer vein, requiring a lot of re-staging of elements of earlier work--like Mickey and Judy putting on a show using bits of old numbers. Take the installation/performance House of Bangs (1999), featuring a make-believe hair salon. What's missing is the gossip, hairdressers too--as well as anything approaching illicit sex. Debuting at the now-defunct Zsa Zsa Gallery, the artists tarted up their audience by trimming, dyeing, and sweeping up their cut hair one head at a time. Revisiting performance art is not easy in a show like this, because the sign that welcomes us to drop by in December for a shearing session has an expiry date that is way past, which is a bit sloppy.

Accompanying the five re-mixes, which range in theme from pirates to martial arts, are three new videos. They're all peppered with "Can't Stop, Won't Stop" verve, fusing teenage angst with the sophisticated nonsense that only the art world can get away with (like claiming witchcraft's connection to hip-hop subversion). In Witch vs. Ninja, a HD video shot half in Venice, Italy and half in Scarlet Hill, Ontario, nubile witches battle--you guessed it--ninjas in the thick of the night. What's great is FASTWURMS's ability to keep it DIY and cultish, while seemingly remaining ageless, romping around with their University of Guelph MFA students. While the black cats, full moons, and all the number 13's painted across the gallery walls are amusing, similar to how Chris Ofili's elephant dung piece played with the mystique of the Virgin Mary, this duo patently subscribes to the vain superficiality of witchcraft, hardly the real thing. Either that, or they're not letting us in deep enough, as no spells are cast on us to think otherwise.

The strongest piece by far is the Quonset hut installation, Pink Donky ("donky," unlike the mammal, refers to anyone or anything that helps someone out). Now they've taken their trademark green pentagram flag to the other end of the spectrum--the hut is flaming pink. Outside the doorway, two upended, cauldron-like objects stand guard like the constellation Libra, but the poster on the left says it all: "The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women for men" (a quote from Alice Walker's The Color Purple). Finally, it seems FASTWURMS's secret society has escaped its own storefront symbolism. Calling to mind the warning markers that litter nature trails, the trio of posters around the entrance--the Walker "flag," a picture of donkeys, and a "No hunting" sign with real bull horns--suggest parts of a missing whole, like key cards from the tarot pack, telling us firmly not where we're located, but where they're at. Could the duo's handle be Wicca for "fasting on worms"?