Joel Singer, Artist

Born in Montreal, Canada in 1948, it was at 12 that I first discovered the enchantment of image-making when my brother set up a black & white darkroom in our basement.  I never tired of the mysterious alchemy of images manifesting in chemical baths.

After several unhappy years in our family-owned furniture business, it was in an introductory ceramics class that I discovered the joy of creating beautiful things from mud; eventually, I returned to college majoring in fine arts and encountered the magic of cinema. Film quickly became my passion, and I began to dream of leaving Canada in order to leap into the great renaissance in avant-garde cinema afoot in the U.S.A.

My search for graduate schools began in 1973 when I had the good fortune to visit San Francisco and sit-in on a film history class taught by the poet/filmmaker James Broughton at the San Francisco Art Institute.  Instantly my life changed; I knew without question that James and San Francisco were it!  I married my guru and we spent the next 15 years in the Bay Area, sharing fully in art and life: we collaborated on seven films and I designed and handset several volumes of his poetry. My photo collages appear as cover art on several other volumes of his work.

In 1989 we moved to the Pacific Northwest, settling in Port Townsend, Washington where we spent the last decade of his life. I became part of an artist’s cooperative gallery and my own photographic collage work thrived.

After James’ death I moved from the woods of the Pacific Northwest to Greenwich Village where I lived in the artist’s building “Westbeth” with the writer-anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum who had been a close friend of ours. I lived with Tobias for 4 years until he lost his battle with Parkinson’s Disease. At what turned out to be Toby’s last public reading in 2004 I met Nirgrantha, a Brooklyn born psychiatrist who was given his Hindu name by his Indian guru in the late 70s. He was building his dream house on the magical island of Bali. In 1979 James and I spent part of a sabbatical year in Bali, and I had always hoped to return. Nirgrantha and I moved to Bali full time in 2009 and lived here until his death in 2021. I have been blessed in loving relationships and met Nana, my wonderful husband in 2021 and we remain in Bali.

I continue to work in both film/video and “photage”. Over the years my work has been exhibited in major museums and institutions around the world. I have had retrospectives of my film work at both the German and Austrian Filmuseums in Frankfurt and Vienna and some of the films are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Joel Singer
Ubud, Bali
2014