Singer currently teaches sculpture at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU) and has 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 Past-chair of Galeries-Ontario-Galleries (GOG), a not-for-profit organization that advances and empowers the public art gallery sector in Ontario. 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, serving as Senior Curator 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 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.
Singer's writings about art have been published internationally (Ceramics Art & Perception, Vie des Arts, Exile Literary Quarterly, and others). He continues to develop independent curatorial projects and consults to collectors and arts organizations (including grant writing). -writer and – currently championing the work of Claire (Weissman) Wilks (1933-2017). He is currently Past-chair of Galeries-Ontario-Galleries (formerly the Ontario Association of Art Galleries -OAAG).
Singer cherishes his long-term relationships with the visionary curators who have championed his work, including Linda Dennis, Virginia Eichhorn, Cesar Forero, Timothy Long, Julie Oakes, and Mary Sue Rankin. The artist also gratefully acknowledges numerous grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts grants which have helped to support his work over the years.
Canadian eco-artist, curator, writer and educator, Christian Bernard Singer was born in 1962 in Paris into a family of artists and raised in New York City where he began as a company dancer with Laura Foreman’s Composers and Choreographers Theater, performing in Spaces and Foreman’s seminal work, Signals II. These were performed over several years in such venues as Judson Memorial Church, the Cubiculo Theater, The New School, and eventually the Museum of Modern Art.
As an environmental artist (Queer ecology), 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. 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 of 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 and his work demonstrates 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 devastation wrought by climate change. Change is change, and even in death, there can be beauty."
In 2020, he was the recipient of the RBC Arts Incubator, an artist-in-residence at Georgian Bay Islands National Park; in 2018, he was invited to speak at the Jubilee Arts International for the Diamond Jubilee of His Highness the Aga Khan in Lisbon, Portugal; and in 2012, he was a Visiting Artist at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD - Atlanta). Six of his pine needle works were purchased by Global Affairs Canada for their AWBZ Visual Arts Collections and are currently installed in Canadian embassies and official residences worldwide. His work is represented by the Headbones Gallery.
Singer’s work has been included in numerous museum and land art invitational exhibitions including: Eco-art Festival – No. 9 Gardens, Subsolo: Laboratório de Arte (Campinas, Brazil), Canadian Clay and Glass Museum, Varley Art Gallery, Kean University Galleries, Kiwi Gardens Sculpture Project (curated by Mary Sue Rankin, Edward Day Gallery), Shore|Lines Project (MacLaren Art Gallery), Temiskaming Art Gallery, Museum of Northern History, Quest Art Gallery, Lake Country Art Gallery and the major touring exhibition, Mobile Structures: Dialogues between Ceramics and Architecture in Canadian Art, MacKenzie Art Gallery and Surrey Art Gallery (curated by Timothy Long).