Artist Talk with FASTWÜRMS
About the Event
Like a wind, like a storm, like a fire, like an earthquake, like a mudslide, like a deluge, like a tree falling, a torrent roaring, an ice floe breaking, like a tidal wave, like a shipwreck, like an explosion, like a lit blown off, like a consuming fire, like spreading blight, like a sky darkening, a bridge collapsing, a hole opening. Like a volcano erupting.
-Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover, 1992
KWAG is thrilled to host an Artist Talk with 2023 Governor General Award-winning artist FASTWÜRMS. For this event, FASTWÜRMS will focus on its most recent body of work as gathered in the exhibition #VOLCANO_LOV3R within their larger worldview and community building practices.
Here, volcanoes are poly-sexual, generative and procreative world builders. They are the dragons and destroyers of worlds. Harbingers of cataclysm, poisonous gas, smothering ash: the death of cities and civilizations. #VOLCANO_LOV3R is an aesthetic cauldron of maximalist profusion: “Nothing succeeds like excess.” (Oscar Wilde) It sleeps with the seismic data of sustainable love, is the hot pocket fumarole queen, the ace of wands and the queen of cups. It is the sun, the star, the lovers and the tower.
About the Artist
The artist FASTWÜRMS is a joint authorship
the trademark of Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse
FASTWÜRMS is a poly-disciplinary artist
formed in 1979 to make independent films,
we also build installations, create paintings, drawings and prints,
make photographs and text art,
we create sculptures and raku ceramics, textile and performance art,
we build public art projects and artist architecture,
we create ecological and social exchange projects
FASTWÜRMS is a witch queer polity:
we expand fields
we build worlds and utopias
and make working models of new ways of being in the world.
FASTWÜRMS is a witch queer epistemology:
we make art as the feral code to knowledge and wisdom
re-imagining the future as a commonwealth of boundless
diversity and poetic cosmology.
FASTWÜRMS is a positivity economy:
we conflate ecological and libidinal economies
we build social making models
we create proliferation prototypes
of mutualism, reciprocity and generosity.
FASTWÜRMS is a liberation narrative:
we have a ‘can’t stop won’t stop’ compulsion
to exceed boundaries and limitations
to build a bountiful and beautiful,
polymorphous and polycultural Avalon
FASTWÜRMS ethos is determined by
the witch ethics algorithm:
Do what you want, harm unto none
love is the law.
FASTWÜRMS aesthetic is maximalist,
a cauldron of boundless abundance:
a praxis of many and more
of profusion and abundance
reciprocity and generosity
“Nothing succeeds like excess.” (Oscar Wilde)
We live and work in the territory of treaty 18,
in an old farm house with many out buildings
with our family of 7 feral rescue cats
Binky, Bootsy, Bokkr, Thorbjorn, Pyewaket, Tupac, Mr Tibbs
next to a swamp and a moon pond
surrounded by wild fields and transplanted trees
right now we are creating work for our project #VOLCANO_LOV3R
firing raku ceramics, tufting textiles and painting pyroclastic watercolours
that tell the story of queer vulcanology
a geo-queer liberation narrative
#VOLCANO_LOV3R conflates maximalist aesthetics
and queer futurity with the world building profusion
and procreative power of the volcano.
we are making the seismic data of sustainable love.
FASTWÜRMS is the recipient of the 2023 Governor General’s Award in Visual and New Media and are represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.
Artist Talks at KWAG are generously supported by Momentum Developments and Sorbara Law.
1) FASTWÜRMS, Rainbow Volcano Atoll #2, 2023. Acrylic on tarpaulin. 289.6 x 354 cm. Photo courtesy of the Artist.
2) FASTWÜRMS crew portrait courtesy of the Artist.
Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, ON N2H 6P7
Canada