Superstition is a sprawling multipart photo installation that mimics the police-procedural crime investigation room, complete with presumed “Stake Out” scenes, “Safe Houses and Getaway Cars,” index cards and photo portraits. Despite the presence of organizational “Maxims,” the nature of the corporate body documented remains ambiguous: it could be criminal, political, heroic, a cult or (most innocently) counter-cultural. In this piece, superstition is elided with suspicion: free-floating conspiracies abound.

Canada’s best known artist witches, FASTWURMS has developed an elaborate iconography drawing on wiccan traditions and symbolism in works that playfully exercise and send up mainstream cultural conventions. Through role playing, costumes, iconic animal forms and invented rituals, their work proposes arcane connections among disparate phenomena. They are often aided by artist friends: Superstition incorporates (and thus documents) members of this creative network. The inscriptions and the index card profiles of members cannily blend the crime detective TV genre with allusion to spies, undercover agents and superheroes, all set within a dizzying conflation of urban and rural cultures.

Delving into rural culture, with its spaces of deep eccentricity, Superstition draws on the central Ontario region around Creemore, where the artists make their home. The typology of buildings and muscle cars, and the tangy blend of squalor, inventive repurposing, and transparent aspirations of respectability captured in Superstition resonate with the rural areas around Kingston and swaths of semi-abandoned agricultural land across eastern Ontario.