Christian Bernard Singer
About
Canadian eco-artist Christian Bernard Singer is best known for incorporating mosses and other living plant life with glass, clay, bronze, found objects, and video into installation-environments and land art works that turn on notions of consciousness, identity, place, memory, and time-passing. Through the post-anthropocentric lens of Queer ecologies and More-than-human disciplines, Singer explores the phenomenon of human consciousness – the fact that we can be conscious of our consciousness, which can open possibilities in sharing in a collective consciousness with other humans, the natural world, the planet, and even the universe. This raises questions about our own impending mortality, about purpose and the unknowable. Our disconnection from the land has now come back to haunt us in the form of Climate Change, but Singer believes that all change has transformative possibilities. For even in death, there can be beauty.
"Throughout my practice, I have sought to characterize the natural world by unexpectedly ‘framing’ it, playing with context, and controlling the ‘organic-ness’ of nature to advance new ways seeing and feeling in ways that demonstrate interconnections rather than othering."
Curator Virginia Eichhorn writes in the exhibition text for Christian Bernard Singer: Between Earth and Sky : "Since time immemorial artists have created work that has tried to articulate the ineffable; to represent the connection with whatever it was that brought our life force into existence; to explore how we are part of the world around us, and that the world also resides within us. Christian Bernard Singer’s work belongs to that legacy of art that speaks to our soul’s intuition and that asserts that knowledge and understanding of place, hope and existence lay far beyond what merely the eye can see."
Artist and curator Julie Oakes writes in the catalogue text for Christian Bernard Singer: Pins and Needles: "Christian Bernard Singer borrows from the preordained harmony that is endemic in much of the natural world to speak in whispers, communicating messages so gentle that they are heard visually, seen audibly, tasted through the fingers and smelt through the eyes. The world of Christian Bernard Singer is overwhelmingly poetic. And yet, as in the natural world, harmony is based in mathematics where an original idea spirals outwards only to be deconstructed so that a brand new visual arises from the preordained."
Christian Bernard Singer was born in 1962 in Paris and raised in New York City where he began as a company dancer with Laura Foreman and John Watts’ Composers and Choreographers Theater. He holds an AOCAD from the Ontario College of Art and Design and an MFA from The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. His works have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Canada and the United States and published in 20 catalogues and books.