Christian Singer

Christian Bernard Singer is an eco-artist, independent curator, writer, and educator.

Working through the lenses of queer ecologies and the more-than-human, Singer is best known for incorporating mosses and other living plant life with glass, clay, bronze, found objects, and video to create installation-environments and land art works that turn on notions of consciousness, identity, place, memory and time-passing. Whether inspired by intricate patterns in nature that reveal themselves through mindful seeing, the movement of air (invisible except by the things it moves), or by the effects wrought by the pine beetle, ash borer, or large-scale weather phenomena, Singer's work is minimalistic, always in a thoughtful balance of colour, texture and space, demonstrating a process that is contemplatively ritualistic. "Throughout my practice, I have sought to characterize the natural world by unexpectedly ‘framing’ it, playing with context, and controlling the ‘organicness’ of nature to advance new ways seeing and feeling. I am committed to hope and beauty, even against the effects of climate change. Change is change, and even in death, there can be beauty." His works have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. Singer is a member of the Throbbing Rose Collective and the Broken Forests Group, and his work has been published in 20 catalogues and books.

Singer has been teaching sculpture at OCAD U since 2006, and also taught at the Toronto School of Art. He has served as a Peer Review Committee Member for the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council and is presently Vice-chair of Crafts Ontario, a not-for-profit organization that promotes and celebrates professional craft through development opportunities, education, and advocacy. Prior to this, he served for 7 years on the board of Galeries-Ontario-Galleries (GOG), a not-for-profit organization that advances and empowers the public art gallery sector in Ontario.

Fluently bilingual, Singer has also curated over 100 exhibitions of both English and French-speaking artists, including three major retrospectives, serving as Senior Curator/Assistant Director of the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Curator of the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, and Curator of the Claire [Weissman] Wilks Estate. Before this, he was Executive Director of the 2005 Contemporary Art Forum – Kitchener & Area (CAFKA), Curator and Associate Director of Lehmann Leskiw Fine Art, and Director and Curator of Rouge Contemporary Art Projects, bringing Judy Chicago: A Survey of Important Works (curated by Virginia Eichhorn) – the first large-scale survey exhibition for Chicago ever to come to Canada. His writings about art have been published internationally and he has lectured throughout Canada and the United States.