Elegy for a Path, 2022
Commission for No. 9 Gardens
Baled hay harvested from and returned to site
220' x 25' x 12'
I am interested in the space that opens when intellectual and emotional perception/experience converge. Activated by the senses, beauty, or ideas, there is momentary reception to physical/metaphysical memories, and of being in the immediate/transcendent “now.” In this space, there is the possibility of revelation.
I see in nature, the miracle and fragility of my own fleeting life force mirrored back to me. For me, this inspires awe and intensifies my awareness of being alive, of being conscious, and of being an individual within a larger interconnected whole.
Incorporating plant life, bronze, clay, wax, found objects, digital media, and other elements, my “living” environment-installations, landworks and sculptures oscillate between permanence and ephemera and turn on notions of interior/exterior space and place.
Pull, 2017
Pine needles, paint on wood base
13” x 13” x 4.5”
AWBZ Visual Art Collection, Global Affairs Canada
Visit Virtual Exhibition
Christian Bernard Singer: From Scattered to Contained, a Retrospective
Christian Bernard Singer is a Canadian eco-artist, curator, writer and educator. Born in Paris and raised in New York City, he began as a company dancer with Laura Foreman’s Composers and Choreographers Theater.
As an environmental artist (Queer ecology), Singer is best known for incorporating living mosses, pine needles and other 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 a making process that is meditative in its laborious meticulousness, his thought-
provoking and highly original works comment on our dissociation to the natural world, while ultimately exploring our relationship with change.
Singer currently teaches sculpture at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU) and has served as a Peer Review Committee Member for the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. 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. Fluently bilingual, Singer has also curated over 90 exhibitions of both English and French-speaking artists, including three major retrospectives and his writings about art have been published internationally.