CURRENTLY "The Tree Project" _ The McMichael Gallery, Kleinberg. Jan.28 -Apr.22, 2012 click on tree to find out more

SOMEBODY

ANYBODY

Not having any particular goal other than, not trying to paint anything or anyone I know or avoid descions about colour or composition. I made it a rule not to question any of the work I was carrying on as I painted.

Many of these paintings took years to complete, and I only arrived at that descision to stop when the works became silent and dense with a certain sense of foreboding if I dared continue.

Again I make it a point not to go looking for what to do next, nothing was considered an error. Some of the works, Red Haired Ghost, has a very disturbing nose, her face seems to float in and out unable to hold itself together.

The NYC Rain Girl, is slipping off the page, her mouth sliding as she speaks and reveals her inner heat. The Prophet is halfway between difigurement and apparition, you want to put him back together so you can identify him or hear his story.

The Everyday Mask, oozes with pain tucked between vibrant vertical lines, at times it resembles someones head in a sack after they've been punched and slapped.

Self Whoretrait 2006
Self Whoretrait 2006
nycRainGrl2.jpg
nycRainGrldtail2.jpg
Mister Bitumen 2008
Mister Bitumen 2008
Red Haired Ghost 2007
Red Haired Ghost 2007
everyDMask2.jpg
everyDMaskDtail2.jpg
Kemo Ghost 2008
Kemo Ghost 2008
Rahim 2007
Somebody Prophet
Somebody Prophet Detail
YGWS 2008

SEED

Seed Collective:

Napoleon Brousseau, Creative Design

Gabe Sawhney, Wireless Design

Galen Scorer, Integration Design

By participating people transform virtual value into real value to the environment that surrounds them, from neighbourhoods to global forests biomes.

The 3,500 virtual trees sponsored by Seventh Generation has resulted in the planting and continued care of well over 300 real trees in the various communities.

Find out more: "Dialing For Dendrology" article

SEED was presented at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad's digital edition (CODE Live 1), as part of a landmark celebration that explored digital creativity.

Screen shot of Seed
Scope Art Fair 2005
Human Nature
Green Barns 2005
Natural Food Expo 2006
SEED Baltimore
SEED New Orleans 2007
Replant New Orleans
Peace Park New Orleans 2007
Peace Park Planting 2007
SEED Urban Screens 2008
Urban Screens particiapant

read more _ www.seedcollective.org

TEN ANTS

THE CAMERON 10ANTS

THE ANTS VIEW Pre Cameron Art BarThe Cameron was a flophouse way back in the day, to describe it much better, it was a slum bar. A term I had never heard till in a conversation with my wife Taras dad. He use to work at the Pickford Movie House on the corner of Spadina and Queen in the thirties. He never stepped into the place and looked puzzled at why I would put Ants on the building. In the early seventy-two, in my first year of art school at OCA, I went in for a draft, but after being served our draft my friend Glen and I bolted for the door, leaving our drinks on the table. An Art Bar is BornIn 1982 I was introduced to Paul Sanella by Rebecca Baird, my studio at 2 Berkley Street had been robbed and I needed a pied de terre, to get my bearings. I remember walking threw the building from floor to floor looking for a room. Many where empty but some of the old guys from the former existance still lived there. After the second and third floor I found a small eight by ten room on the fourth floor with a sink, I spray painted an alien on the window and it was mine. In 1983 I painted the Alien Lounge, a large room on the second floor of the building with an adjacent kitchen, Herb put in a great bar, and we inaugurated it with a showing of Fastwurm films. I had talked to Paul and Herb about the front of the building, something had to change.Our Fastwurm holdout was on Queen Street next to Trinity Bellwood Park, we had burnt a crucifix on the front door of the studio to keep people away. The local church had requested we cover up the cross for the upcoming papal visit, mainly because the Pontiff was going to be visiting the adjacent church. We responded by putting chain link over it to protect it, anyway anything Popish was the current blab. I suggested to H & P that the front of the Cameron needed that big American city after five metal gate look but instead I would paint it papal indigo and have the corner pillar in the entrance gold. I used automotive metallic paint for the finish.The entrance was made to simulate a Neolithic cave entrance, with bone and antelope horn imprints in the concrete. The work was carried out during the night a lot of the time because to many people coming and going from the bar. Paul Sanella and I would spend may nights out there working, one night when we were doing the concrete entrance way we were talking about the rest of the building, I felt it needed something to hold it all together, a unitary object that would reflect what was going on inside. We started right away with insects and after a few minutes realized that it had to be ants. It was perfect, art history has so many ant references, Dali, Ant Farm, Wojnarowicz, and it was the perfect metaphor for the interior activity. Picking a number I concluded ten, and Paul started to laugh, Get it, Ten Ants, the rest is history.They had no more money for the exterior reno, so I got paid with free rent for almost ten years; I made the ants out of coat hangers and found scraps of wood from the Cameron basement, with gaffing tape, spray paint, a few of the more fortunate ants where created with fiberglass resin and cloth, two of those still exist today in 2011.The Pope did go by the Cameron and Paul had tried to get a Papal blessing, which was flatly denied by the local Archdiocese. But years later while in Rome, we (the Fastwurms) where shooting a film of Napo on the wagon, trying to be redeemed at the Vatican, so we found ourselves at Saint Peters. That is when we discovered that you could buy a Papal Blessing for thirty five dollars, so we got one for the Cameron House. It use to hang on the wall behind the bar downstairs, but over the years disappeared. Maybe the Pope took it back. I spent 1985 to early 1987 living in NYC. I worked with Kenny Baird at Area Night Club. We worked on club interior change overs with a new theme every eight weeks. One theme was Surrealism, and so I constructed over thirty ants to go along with a human scale chess board. Most of those ants disappeared into Manhattan after the change over. AA Bronson was curating a show at the Powerplant Gallery in June of 1987 From Sea to Shinning Sea so I was commissioned to make ants for the outside of the building. The arrangements were that the ants would then go to the Cameron to replace and that had been vandalized or stolen over the years. Later in 1994, all of the ants where removed from the building, to people shouting at me to leave the ants alone. I had to constantly shout down to people that they where getting a makeover, most of them need minor repairs and fresh paint. Finally in 2009, during Nuit Blanche, friends Sean Wakfer and Jamie Osborne and Kara B helped me remove the original ants, mummifying the salvageable ones in shrink wrap plastic and giving them new legs. Also, as a request from my daughter we crowned a Queen Ant for the Cameron façade. Today the ants make there appearance at the MOCCA in Toronto, where they will be vigilant over the exterior of the museum for the summer of 2010.

Nuit Blanche 2009 - Ghost Ants _ the Cameron House - Toronto

PAST WORKS

On this page Images from the following shows TEXT TO FOLLOW New Portraiture The GetWel Luminous Landscape Brewsoul Fifinochio Chronicles

Tara Greene
Richard Gorman
Fiona Smyth
Gary Micheal Dault
Leah Jaya
Cocoa and Slavery Installatio
The Get Well
Get Well Interior
The Get Well
Get Well Detail
Mono Lake California
Badwater Death Valley
Devils Corn Field Death Valley
Zabrinsky Point Death Valley
Bow River Alberta
Cabal Economics
Gusher Denial State
Compassion Bubble
Guyser Denial State
Kronos 1998
Fifi Inferno 1998
Uncle Shim 1998
The Denial State
Aunt Fifi
Fifi Shwah

DRAWINGS

Genometry

Hope Studies

Marseilles Bivouac

India Miniatures

242 Monuments

Recovery Book

Genometry 2002
Genometry 2002
Genometry 2002
Genometry 2002
Genometry 2002
Hope Studio 1996
Hope Studio 1996
Hope Studio 1996
Hope Studio 1996
Hope Studio 1996
Marseilles Bivouac 1995
Marseilles Bivouac 1995
Marseilles Bivouac 1995
Marseilles Bivouac 1995
Marseilles Bivouac 1995
India Miniatures 1992
India Miniatures 1992
India Miniatures 1992
India Miniatures 1992
India Miniatures 1992
242 Monuments 1990
242 Monuments 1990
242 Monuments 1990
242 Monuments 1990
242 Monuments 1990
Naga Studio Visit
Angel's Kiss
Union Dance
Art Groupie
Palace Guard

DIGITAL IMAGES

monetintro
introdeadtree
swampi~4
swampscreenshot13
swampscreenshot02
seed_newspaper_tree
seed_greenstamp_tree
seed_ancestor_tree
seed_tire_tree
seed_meat_tree
preshow
sensapks
touch
sight
taste
metamiror
bachelor_stripped_bare
blueey~1
brewsoul_gyeser_denial_state
Kronos 1998
Fifi Inferno 1998
Uncle Shim 1998
The Denial State
Aunt Fifi
Fifi Shwah

FASTWURMS

FASTWURMS 1979-1991

The images are works created during Napo B's involvement with the trio known as Fastwurms.

In 1979 Kim Kozzy and Napo B began showing their films at the Funnel in Toronto. The duo built elaborate sets for their super 8 sound films, this was early FW. In 1984 Dai Skuse joined the group with their first show as a trio.In 1991 Napo B left FW after ten years as a member of the Wurms

The work presented here was created during in the first twelve years of Fastwurms. Below is a link to a blog set up to set the story straight on the first ten years of Fastwurms, because over the years many details have been overlooked or deleted from the true facts and history of the group.

WURM CULTURE BLOG

PRESS - REVIEWS No Frame

Exhibitions - Reviews 1983 - 2003

Exhibitions Currrent > 1974 DOWNLOAD PDFSolo 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. Canada2009 Ten Ant Renewal, Nuit Blanche, Toronto_2008 SEED, Urban Screens, Melbourne Australia_SEED, International New Media Festival, Hubei, China2007, 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
. 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. _____________________________________________________________ "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 by Gary Michael Dault. 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. _________________________________________

CONTACT

Jan 14,2012 This site is being re-configured over the next few days. NewLaunch Date Jan20th 2012

SEED Culture Days _ Ontario Science Centre

Above ^ Video of SEED at the Ontario Science Centre as part of the CULTURE DAYS event.

Angell Gallery Show Review

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TV feature of Fifinochico show at Angell Gallery

Xoanna Installation AGO 1988

Napo being interviewed by Isabel Vincent,, of TFO about Fastwurm AGO - Perspective 88 installation.