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OFFICIAL SITE OF NAPOLEON BROUSSEAU
SEED _ CODE Live 1
CFC (Canadian Film Centre) recently participated in the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad's digital edition (CODE Live 1), as part of a landmark celebration that explored digital creativity. read more
The Seed Collective with their ongoing digital reforestation intitiative provided audience involvement with SEED as part of CODE Live 1, at Great Northern Way Campus for the Winter Olympics in Whistler BC . Starting February 12 - February 28 , 2010. We thank all those who participated and the individuals that made it possible.
Seed Collective:
Napoleon Brousseau, Gabe Sawhney, Galen Scorer
Seed is a powerful metaphor of reforestation which puts the responsibility on the members of the audience who can control and grow a forest, tree by tree, through their own mobile phone keypad and watch the results on a screen, which are reproduced in a real forest.
Read Canadian Film Centre Press Realease
Read Review in Vancouver Courier
Read Review in Vancouver Observer
also visit www.seedcollective.org for more about SEED
With support from "The Canadian Film Centre Media Lab"
Exhibitions 1974 > Current
Solo Exhibitions
2009 Somebody Anybody - Ghost Show, DeLong Gallery, Toronto_
2003 "Brewsoul", Angell Gallery, Toronto_
2002 "The New Portraiture", Angell Gallery, Toronto_
2001 "The Getwell", Deleon White Gallery, Toronto_
1999 "The Fifinochio Chronicles", Angell Gallery, Toronto_
"This Year's Winners", Mantle Project, Chapters, Toronto_
1998 "Yuletide Bastroids", the Anteroom, Toronto_
1997 "Trance Illuminations", IQ Gallery, Toronto_
1996 "Bivouac", Gallerie Pallinure, Marseilles, France_
1991 "Eye Drawn", Lake Gallery, Toronto_
1990 "Wall Drug", (Fastwurm), University of Toronto_
"Honky Tonk", (Fastwurm), Purple Institution, Toronto_
"Ground to Ground", (Fastwurm), Osaka 90, Japan_
"Birch Hive", (Fastwurm), Skydome,Toronto_
"Massassauga Lily", (Fastwurm), First Financial Place, Toronto_
1988 "Arbor Vitae", (Fastwurm), Forest City Gallery, London ON_
"Vermi Velocity", (Fastwurm), Canadian Cultural Centre,_ Rome, Italy_
"Sheet Rock Xoanna", (Fastwurm),_ Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto_
1987 "Stink Bug Lodge", Bond Gallery, New York_
1986 "Chew or Die", (Fastwurm), Ydessa Gallery, Toronto_
"Birch Girl Plaza", (Fastwurm), Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Alberta_
"Tombpossum Wombblossom", (Fastwurm), ARC, Toronto_
1985 "Know By Heart Lodge", (Fastwurm), Ydessa Gallery, Toronto_
1984 "Snow She Bones", Ydessa Gallery, Toronto_
1983 "Be My Magnet", The Funnel Film Gallery, Toronto_
1981 "Fish Hooks To You", (Fastwurm),_ The Funnel Film Gallery, Toronto_
1980 "Universal Colour Systems", (Fastwurm),_ Splash Gallery, Ottawa_
1978 "Anonymous Artists Army", Feldman Gallery, Ottawa_
1976 "Voyeur Vortex", Gallery 76, Toronto_
1975 "Decade Control", Gallery 76, Toronto_
1974 "Suspended Steel", Gallery 76, Toronto
Group Exhibitions
2010 SEED, Olympic Winter Games, Whistler, B.C. Canada
2009 Ten Ant Renewal, Nuit Blanche, Toronto_
2008 SEED, Urban Screens, Melbourne Australia_
SEED, International New Media Festival, Hubei, China
2007, New Aquisitions, Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta_
Crowd Conscious, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston_
SEED, One Ton Tree, New Hope Baptist Church, New Orleans, USA_
2006 "Deluxe Mix", DeLong Gallery, Toronto_
2005 "SEED", SCOPE Art Fair, New York_
"SEED", Interactive 05, Toronto_
"Luminous Memory", Deleon White Gallery, Toronto_
"Low Hanging Fruit", Emmersive Gallery, Toronto_
2004 "Deluxe Mix", DeLong Gallery, Toronto_
2003 "Standards", DeLong Gallery, Toronto_
2002 "Biophilia", State Legislature of New Mexico, Santa Fe_
"One Touch of Nature", Gallery 96, Stratford, ON_
2001 "Genometry, with David Bolduc, Angell Gallery, Toronto_
"Loaded", Angell Gallery, Toronto_
2000 "Approach", Archive Inc. Gallery, Toronto_
"Hearth Mandala Renewal", Deleon White Gallery, Toronto_
1998 "Cold City Invitational, Cold City Gallery, Toronto_
1997 "Ego Erotica", the Anteroom, Toronto_1
996 "Elemental Drives", Hope Studio, Toronto_
1995 "Transe-Gallere", Gallerie des Penitants, Marseilles, France_
"Invitational", Cold City Gallery, Toronto_
1992 "Team Spirit", (Fastwurm), Laumeier Sculpture Park,_ St.Louis,
Missouri_
"Team Spirit", (Fastwurm), Davenport Art Museum,_ Davenport, Iowa_
1991 "Team Spirit", (Fastwurm), Spirit Square Art Centre, Charlotte, North
Carolina_
"Team Spirit", (Fastwurm), Art Museum of Florida, Miami_
"Team Spirit", (Fastwurm), Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC_
"Team Spirit", (Fastwurm), Newberger Museum, Purchase, New York_
1990 "Word Jungle", A B C No Rio, New York _
"Salvage Paradigm", (Fastwurm), YYZ Gallery, Toronto_
"Birch Hive Edition", (Fastwurm), Open Studio, Toronto_
1989 "Shelf Life", Purple Institution, Toronto_
"Peinture en Direct", Foufoune Electrique, Montreal, PQ_
"Bee Still", (Fastwurm), Grace Hopper Gallery, Toronto_
"Ugh 89", (Fastwurm), Centre International_ d'Art Contemporain, Montreal, PQ_
1988 "Sea to Sea", The Powerplant Gallery, Toronto_
"Belief Structures", (Fastwurm), Mercer Union Gallery, Toronto_
"Theatre Tableau", (Fastwurm),_ Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba_
1987 "Eratici Percossi", (Fastwurm), Acireal, Sicily_
"Polyphonic", (Fastwurm), Genezanno, Italy
"Casual Casual Art Exchange", (Fastwurm), Paris, France_
1986 "Massage for Harvey Milk", (Fastwurm), IDA Gallery, Toronto_
"Innerspace", (Fastwurm), Artspace, Peterborough,ON_
1985 "Power of the Cross", (Fastwurm), Republic, Toronto_
1983 "Critic's Choice", (Fastwurm), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto_
"Vision Guest", (Fastwurm), CNE Pavilion, Toronto_
1983 "Chromaliving", (Fastwurm), Chromozone, Toronto_
1982 "Command Drawn", YYZ Gallery, Toronto_
1974 "A Survey", Saw Gallery, Ottawa
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Napoleon Brousseau Bio
GHOST PAINTER
You could call them Ghost Paintings, stream of consciousness portraits of somebodies and anybodies. People I don't know and might have met or the other way around.
Painted in successive layers so thin, that the veils of paint slowly reveal a wavering shimerring apparition of someone looking back at me.
Urban Screens, outdoor installation, Melbourne Australia
Screencapture of SEED at The Great North Way Campus, Vancouver BC during 2010 Winter Olympic Games.
Sponsored by Seventh Generation
Earth Day, New Orleans. Lara and Hillary busy planting lemon trees.
City Year, Seventh Generation, SEED Collective, Replant New Orleans work to finish Peace Garden in Centre City.
First presentation of SEED
By participating with the virtual play of SEED people transform virtual value into real value, to the environment that surrounds them, from neighbourhoods to global forests biomes.
Find out more at...
www.seedcollective.org
The 2,500 virtual trees sponsored by Seventh Generation has resulted in the planting of well over 300 trees that get continuous care in the various communities.
Seed offers an opportunity for people to take a moment to create a work of art for themselves that they can download and have as a memento of their support and belief in a greener planet.
On behalf of all, the SEED Collective we thank sponsors and volunteer organizations who partnered with us in this ongoing project that transform our urban environment.
Projects sponsored by
SEVENTH GENERATION
Read more
Installation of Napo's new Ten Ants on the Cameron House, Toronto. See more images of installation night.
Restoring the Queen Ant before mummyfying her in shrink wrap plastic for future properity.
Chocolate, Rock Salt, Recycled Drawings on Achival Paper, Industrial Fan.
The link below takes you to press release of show "Art tThat Weeps For Our Sins"
Large chocolate covered recycled drawings forming a weeping well that you can stand in. It weeps chocolate onto the floor after three days of operation.
New Portraiture show at Angell Gallery. Digitaly reworked photographs.
Oil on Canvas, 2 x 2.5 m.
Oil on Canvas, 2 x 2.5 m. Exhibited at the Angell Gallery
INVITATION to installation at the Purple Institution, Toronto CA
Day Glo and Mixed media on panel, 1990. 2 x 2.5 m. installation at the Purple Institution, Toronto CA
Birch bark, crystal, tree, copper, extreme low frequency generator set at 8.6 hz , 1990
Permanet Installation, First Financial Place, Toronto
Installation at Osaka 90, Osaka Japan
Cente International D'Art Contemporain, Montreal, PQ
Site Specific Installation, Winnipeg Art Gallery. Six Pitch Otter Slide
Day Glo and Mixed media on panel, 1988. 2 x 2.5 m.
Day Glo and Mixed media on panel, 1990. 2 x 2.5 m. Collection of Napo B
Site Specific Installation, Ydessa Gallery Toronto, Elements, Mount Jambon, Foundry of Molded Visions, Wall Of Fatigue, Burning Grotto, Burial Mound, Frozen Lake, Spudnik.
Day Glo and Mixed media on panel, 1987, 2 x 2.5 m. Collection of The Winipeg Art Gallery
Show Currated by Achille Bonita Oliva, Rezegna Internationale Del Arte, Sicily 1987, Birch Girl with Lipstick and Shoe Polish on Birch Bark, Lingua De Christi, Red Wool Blanket, Salt, Tar, Water,
Site Specific Installation, Ydessa Ydessa Gallery Toronto, Elements, Mount Jambon, Foundry of Molded Visions, Wall Of Fatigue, Burning Grotto, Burial Mound, Frozen Lake, Spudnik.
Ydessa Gallery Toronto, Elements, Mount Jambon, Foundry of Molded Visions, Wall Of Fatigue, Burning Grotto, Burial Mound, Frozen Lake, Spudnik.
Chromaliving at the Manual Life Centre, Toronto
FASTWURMS
1979-1991
The work presented here was created in the first eleven years of Fastwurms.
Oo La La Interview "Ou est Fifi ?"
Angell Gallery Show
. CAPSULATED EXHIBITON REVIEWS ....
" Media as mixed as they come "
The Toronto Star -- Art By Numbers. Saturday, June 21, 2003.
by Susan Walker.
Hell 'en High Heels Kabal, by Napoleon Brousseau
Napoleon Brousseau (formerly the Napo B of Fastwürms) could be known for his titles alone. In 1999 he had a show called "The Fifinochio Chronicles"; two years later he did "The Getwell Test." His current show, closing later today at the Angell Gallery, is "brewsoul." The title is a pun on his name, but it's not mere wordplay. "It's like a brew in the soul kitchen," says Brousseau. There are works in the show going back as far as 1995, but theyrelate to more current work.
Media don't get more mixed than this. There are paintings, pastels, drawings in marker ink, digitally composed pictures - sometimes several media appear to be employed in one picture.
Brousseau works on the evolutionary principle.A number of paintings in this show originated as digital images that the artist created on computer, working his wizardry with PhotoShop. "In a way my paintings are never finished. I keep taking photos of them and when they most closely represent the digital pictures then I consider them finished." After "New Portraiture," an uncommonly serious show he presented in 2002, Brousseau felt it was time to have some fun. The kind of fun he had in mind starts with a meditative practice that leads to his drawing hundreds of sketches, scarcely looking at the paper, and sometimes timing himself with an egg timer to make sure he doesn't spend too much time on each one. "I might do 200 or 300 of these sketches in a day," he says. It's a stream-of-consciousness tactic he employs to keep coming up with fresh images. "I've been painting since I was 14. I'm 53 now. I have to be careful that I don't just fall back on my skills. To do this I have to suppress my inner critic."
Hell 'en High Heels Kabal began with one of these sketches, seen on the wall beside it. It's called Shoo-Head, and it's a charcoal drawing from 1995 of a human skull sitting snugly in a high-heeled shoe. "I love drawing high heels. It either looks right or it doesn't. When it looks right it really jazzes up a painting. I've even put high heels on cars.""I did my first oil painting of the sketch a year later. Then I took that painting and digitally reworked it. I came up with a wire-frame version of the head. Then I did another painting, but without brushes. I used rollers to get a pixelated effect." Brousseau did a pair of skulls in a pair of high heels. Then he got the idea of using the Pinocchio nose (from his hermaphrodite Fifis) because a nose can exist in a wireframe skull, but not on a real skull. "I drew them together having a secret meeting. One (with the nose) is whispering lies into the other's ear. I did this painting during the Iraq war when a lot of things were being done in secret, but we only got the surface version."
Brousseau removed himself from the tradition of oil paintings, so the works in this show are not done on stretched canvas and they're not framed. They're painted on vinyl and float on the wall. "So it's oil on oil," he says.
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"Provocative brew thrills the soul"
The Globe and Mail. Saturday, May 31, 2003, Page R12
by Gary Michael Dault.
Brewsoul is both the name of this exhibition of new work by Napoleon Brousseau, the name of his Web site ( http://www.brewsoul.com ), and, as a derivative of his own name, a compressed way of describing his generative fervour as an artist.The Toronto-based, world-travelling Brousseau, whose Brewsoul opened on Thursday at the Angell Gallery in Toronto, is one of those electric/ eclectic artists who pours all of his experience and all of his multifaceted musings directly into his work. The result is a thrilling sort of imagistic and metaphysical chaos that throws you back on your own resources in a way that is both liberating and unnerving. Keeping himself "as loose as possible," as he puts it, in his relationship to mass-media images and the meanings he extracts from them, Brousseau wields both brush and computer in his restless pursuit of the sensuous and political truths of our howlingly misguided lives.
His approach is spontaneous, disconcertingly direct and, sometimes, intriguingly improper. In his Old Faithful Denial State, for example, two of the bizarre characters he calls his Fifis -- odd transsexual sprites that possess and are possessed by enormous phallic noses -- engage in a kind of short-circuited act of nose orality in a great translucent bubble which floats hugely in a sky near a lushly-painted crowd scrutinizing the eruption of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone Park. "Old Faithful has changed," Brousseau tells me. "It has to be made faithful now, has to be made to erupt on time, like a special effect. So even the geyser is now complicit with the ongoing mess of late capitalism." The geyser is eruptive and, more specifically, ejaculatory. Which is, presumably, no longer an entirely natural process. Even sex is thus subsumed by techno-political control. The two mutualizing Fifis, who might have been forces for sensuous good, sexual muses, seem oblivious to humanity's fallen condition, isolated, as they are, in their own self-absorption. All this gives Brousseau a sort of wistful Wilhelm Reich-like feel (Reich being the renegade defector from Freud's tribe who felt that we had all become too "armoured" to have orgasms and built us "orgone boxes" to help).
The rest of this riveting exhibition is just as dense and provocative, with its floating Eve-like woman weeping or drooling a new world (Landscape Bubble) and its wire-frame skulls nestled in high-heeled pumps (Helen Highheels Kabul). Everything is beautifully drawn, exquisitely painted, cunningly digitalized -- and passing strange.
_______________________________________
"MY INCOGNITO PORTRAIT"
The Globe and Mail. Saturday, March 2, 2002 - Print Edition, Page R11
This is me. Actually, it is and isn't me.
A few months ago, Napoleon Brousseau, whose exhibition, The New Portraiture, has just opened at Toronto's Angell Gallery, called to ask if he could come around and take my photograph. Although I've known Brousseau for 25 years (he was a student of mine when he and his then partner, artist Kim Kozzi, founded the soon-to-be legendary art duo Fast Wurms), I remember protesting that I was busy, unkempt and otherwise unqualified, just at the moment, for immortality.
"That doesn't matter," Brousseau explained happily, "I'll just be a few minutes. We'll take the photo in your dining room, in front of the books and, given the way I'm doing it, nobody will recognize you anyhow. It won't really be you -- it'll just be your outline."
The critic has become little more than a collection of books, barely distinguishable from his library.
In another portrait, artist and friend Italo Abate sits on a couch in his studio, a clutter of colour filling his outline and three pugs vying for space on his lap. Brousseau has cut and pasted elements from elsewhere in the studio to fill the background to overflowing.
The portraits of his own family are particularly engaging. Daughter Leah is pictured in an acid-washed version of a toy store, resting triumphantly on a bicycle. His wife, Tara, is posed in the meat aisle of a supermarket, gingerly holding a packaged slab of meat. Thanks to Brousseau's digital manipulation, she's been coloured in beef tones.
The delight and intimacy in these portraits signal Brousseau's mastery of whatever medium he decides to tackle.
__________________________________________________________
"NEW PORTRAITURE ALTERNATIVE VISION"
Baby Sitter, NOW Magazine, March 14, 2002.
by Thomas Hirshmann
If you dislike those stodgy old portraits whose stern eyes follow your every move, then Napoleon Brousseau's latest show is for you. The subjects have no eyes. In fact, the subjects are barely subjects.With this series of portraits, Brousseau departs from the very dark pieces of his previous show at Angell. The new images are a bombardment of colour digitally manipulated to make each sitter an afterthought within his or her surroundings.
Brousseau was right. The resulting portrait, which is included in the new exhibition, is of course not really me. In a certain way, though, it is me and more. The way Brousseau has deployed his digital camera, the background comes smiling through, bright and assertive: you can clearly see the papier-mâché Batman mask my children once made, for example, and my C-3PO cookie jar, whereas I have been digitally liquefied into a volume of translucent jelly that looks sort of humanoid, but which is clearly composed of the very books before which I sit. As with any good renaissance portrait, I am here accompanied by my own attributes. You are, presumably, what you read.
The other subjects of Brousseau's New Portraiture are similarly accompanied and contextualized. Painter Richard Gorman has been digitally inserted into one of his paintings and seems gradually to emerge from it. His own legs extend from the bottom of the painting in such a way that the painting is now free to perambulate -- painting and painter having magically become one. Ana Serrano, a friend of Brousseau's from the Canadian Film Institute -- where he has recently completed a residency -- stands out in the landscape. In contrast to the trees around her, she is made up entirely of text. Artist and designer Fiona Smyth is a crystallized riot of her own funky possessions, smiling gleefully through her own engulfment.
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Perspective 88,Art Gallery of Ontario
TFO French TV interview
Selected Publications & Reviews 1983 - 1999
CURRENTLY BEING UPDATED
1999 Canadian Art, Vol.16, No.4, "Because I'm not particularly a traveler", Gary M. Dault_
Globe & Mail, July 24, "Making a good impression with prints",Gary M. Dault_
Globe & Mail, May 8, "Napoleon Brousseau at the Deleon White Gallery", Gary M. Dault_
Globe & Mail, Jan. 30, "The Fifinochio Chronicles",Gary M. Dault_
Eye Magazine, Jan. 28, "Lies women tell men, Donna Lypchuk_
National Post, Jan. 26, "Those noses know tales of delight and deceit"_
1990 Canadian Art Vol.7, No.2, "Natural Inclinations", Lisa Rochon_
Globe & Mail, Sept. 28, "Salvage Paradigm_
Sometimes Engaging", John Bentley Mays Globe & Mail, Sept. 1,
"Exploring Nature in An Urban Hive", Isabel Vincent_
Globe & Mail, April 26, John Bentley Mays
Metropolis, Aug. 19, "Wacky Wonderful Fastwurms",_Donna Lypchuck_
1989 Parachute, No.58, "Les Cents Jours D"Art Contemporain", Lynda
Portugais_
Artscribe, Jan./Feb., "FASTWURMS", Richard Rhodes_
Le Devoir, Sept. 2, "Fastwurms: Anti-Colonialists",_ Claire Gravel_
1988 Globe & Mail, Aug., "Fastwurms probes the nature of things", Lisa
Rochon_
1987 Artpost, Fall, "Chew or Die", Tom Gottlieb_
Tema Celeste, April-June, "Review Of Erratici Percorsi",_Antonio
D'Avossa_
Flash Art, April/May, "Review of Erratici Percorsi",
Art Perry_ Calgary Herald, Sept., "Artist Trio concocts Heady Brew", Nancy
Tousley_
Globe & Mail, Aug. 8, "Myriad messages from a travelling trio", John Bentley
Mays_
The Vancouver Sun, April 4, "VAG opens display of local_works", Elizabeth
Godley_
1986 Now Magazine, June 11-17, "Revitalizing avant-garde, animating
Toronto", Deirdre Hanna_
Globe & Mail, Oct. 23, "Review of Fastwurms at A.R.C.", John Bentley Mays_
1985 Globe & Mail, Oct. 12, "Video alive and well despite censors",_
John Bentley Mays_
The Canadian Forum, Dec., "The National Set-Up",Scott Lauder_
Toronto Life, Oct., "Fall by the Ydessa Gallery", Gary Michael Dault_
Vanguard, April, "Review of Fastwurms at Gallery 620",_David McFadden_
1984 Globe & Mail, May 17, "Napoleon Brousseau at the Cameron", John
Bentley Mays_
1983 Vanguard, Sept., "Snow-She-Bones", Diana Nemiroff_
Flash Art, March, "Canada: Anyone; Anywhere; Anything", Ian Wallace
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