LEAH SINGER

— As a journalism student, I had a job on campus working at the newspaper morgue: a basement archive where newspaper clippings were kept for research. I used tiny, pointy scissors, to meticulously clip articles from The Christian Science Monitor or The Globe and Mail. The clippings were cataloged and put in folders with titles like, Crime: At Night. It was the beginning of my obsession with seeing the newspaper as a material.

Newspapers often inform my work. I self-published a newspaper series of graphic silhouettes called, copy, which I made on various regional printing presses. I did a lithograph edition of words re-photographed from headlines. I have a formidable collection of newspapers with production flaws. These are some examples. They are always a nice surprise, like accidental works of art. I can see Franz Kline, Warhol, and Christopher Wool. I also see the printing press working this process so hard, churning out huge runs of daily papers with a lucky few receiving the ones that got messed up.

I really should stop my New York Times delivery since I tend to read the paper on my phone these days but I can’t because I want to catch as many of these poetic aberrations as I can before newspapers are really gone.

October 10th, 2015

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Leah Singer was born in Winnipeg, moving east to Toronto, Montreal and Tokyo before settling in New York City. She is a visual artist and a writer. Her artist publications are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The live manipulated film and video performances she started doing in the early 1990s in collaboration with musicians, including husband Lee Ranaldo, have toured widely including to The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Reykjavik Arts Festival, and the JUE music festival in Shanghai. She continues to develop site-specific video installations intended to exist both as static artworks and components to live music performances. She recently contributed video to the multi artist project, THE EXHIBITION OF A FILM, curated by Mathieu Copeland.