In his sun-splashed office in San Francisco’s Mission District, artist Brian Singer had something very important to say about unicorns. “Did you know that there are nine instances of the word ‘unicorn’ in the Bible?” he asked, handing out a Bible with every word but the nine “unicorns” blacked out with an acrylic paint pen. The corner office, where Singer’s design firm, Altitude Associates, operates, was outfitted with exposed brick walls and large windows. Glass soda bottles, arranged by size, lined one of the desks.
“It probably seems like I’m making fun of the Bible,” he said. “But it’s more like, doesn’t anyone see that? Doesn’t anyone find that interesting?”
Singer often draws attention to the forgotten and the overlooked in his work. In another series, Singer hung signs declaring “Home Street Home” above sleeping homeless people in San Francisco. The project was inspired when the homeless man who slept outside his office disappeared one day. “The day that I really noticed was the day that he was gone, and I kind of freaked out about it,” he noted.
Singer is the self-declared “oddball” of his family; his father is a government geologist, his mother studied math and his brother is in finance. After studying applied art and design at Cal Poly, Singer moved to San Francisco in 2000 and founded Altitude Associates, an alternative to some of the more staid creative agencies. At night, he began using an artistic alter ego, “some guy,” on the Web.
Singer’s work as “some guy,” beginning with the critically acclaimed 1,000 Journals project he launched in 2000, seeks to foster connection between strangers. The project, which was exhibited at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, consisted of journals he sent out into the world that strangers could write and draw in, then pass on to others. “When I first started the 1,000 Journals project, it seemed like the project wasn’t about me,” he said of his “some guy” alias. “It’s all these other people that made the project happen. I think I wanted to be anonymous.” More recently, Singer launched 1,001 Journals, a website where users can upload and scan their own collaborative journals to share online.
In some ways, much of Singer’s art serves as a reaction to the overdigitized world he inhabits in the tech belly of Silicon Valley. To him, there is significance in the corporeal and the tangible, and this is why he chose physical journals instead of creating a cooperative blog. With the Internet being the “primary mode of communication for folks,” Singer said that the project was about “taking a physical artifact to be passed from human to human and sent through the mail, to make those connections that are so easily made online.”
Singer’s fascination with juxtaposition — perhaps best exemplified by the dual nature of his professional and personal art lives — also bleeds into his more recent series. “I’m inspired by things that are weathered, things that are very complex, things that are monotonous,” he said.
Currently he is working on illuminating odd word pairings in classic texts. For a few hours each night, he settles into his apartment with the TV on and slowly brings an acrylic pen to a text, painstakingly crossing out every word except for one or two. He did this with J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” only leaving in every instance of “goddamn” in the book. With the Bible, he has gone through every page and scratched out all but the words “love” and “evil.”
“I like twisting things around a little bit and making people think,” he said, fingering the rippled spine of another Bible he is working on: This one will be unreadable, except for the words “faith” and “gold.” “I didn’t grow up religious,” he admitted, “but I’ve always found the Bible fascinating.”
Singer obviously has a soft spot for the controversial. His “212 Slaves” series, which will feature 10 different editions of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” blacked out except for the n-word, is a nod to the controversy surrounding the republishing of the same text with “slave” replacing the racial slur.
All of Singer’s work, from his street art to his recent projects with the Bible, retains an essential strand: harnessing strangeness to help people connect in an overconnected world. “Some of the stuff I’ve done I definitely don’t think people love,” he said. “But the fact that they saw it and had a reaction to it is enough for me.”
