danny singer, gallery jones, canadian artist, fine art gallery, awardwinning artist, helen siwak, folioyvr, vancouver, bc, yvr

Danny Singer: The Main Street Project x A Prairie Vision

Danny Singer photographs the entire main streets of small prairie towns. Not a building here, a storefront there, but the whole street, stitched together from as many as one hundred and fifty sequential images into a single seamless panorama.

Danny Singer | Michael O’Shea Photography

Every structure is shot straight on. No angle, no drama, no cheating the perspective. The effect is strange and precise at once, an image built from multiple vanishing points that somehow amounts to one continuous truth.

The finished prints are large, often enormous. Viewers can walk right up and lose themselves in the smallest details: peeling paint on a grain elevator, hand-lettered signage above a hardware store, the particular slump of a roofline that has seen sixty prairie winters.

These images look effortless, but they are not. Behind each one sits a considerable amount of technical labour, invisible in the final result, which is precisely the point.

Dysart SK Summer Sky | Danny Singer

Singer’s project asks the viewer to consider how architecture, geography, and weather sit together on the prairie. How a diverse row of structures relates to the empty spaces between them. How an entire street rests on the land beneath it. And how the people who built these towns, whose presence now only lingers, are felt rather than seen.

His work runs along the one hundredth meridian, concentrated in Alberta and Saskatchewan, occasionally drifting as far south as Texas. His grandparents homesteaded on these prairies. He spent summers there as a child. That connection has never left him.

The project began in 2001, and twenty-five years later, it stands as one of the most sustained bodies of work in contemporary Canadian photography.

Oxford Sky | Danny Singer

From CBC to Still-Life

Singer was born in Edmonton, Alberta. His career, however, began somewhere else entirely.

He worked as a cameraman and director for the CBC, learning to see moving images long before he committed to a single frame. In 1970, he relocated to Montreal and made the shift to still photography, a decision that would eventually define his life’s work.

Working within the tradition of documentary photography, but pushing it forward with contemporary technique, Singer turned his lens toward the small towns of the Canadian prairies and the American Midwest. He presented them not as quaint or forgotten, but as grand panoramas worthy of serious attention.

Art critic Nancy Tousley put it plainly: the human eye could never take in what Singer manages to show in these serenely beautiful, exquisitely detailed colour prints. High praise, and accurate.

Composed of up to one hundred and forty sequential images fused into a single panorama, his photographs stand as eloquent, celebratory expressions of Western Canadian culture. Singer now lives and works in Vancouver, still chasing the same street, town after town.

Lipton | Danny Singer

Building a National Presence

Four decades of solo exhibitions across Canada tell their own story. Vancouver’s Gallery Jones has remained a consistent home for new work, beginning in 2009, with the upcoming presentation marking his sixth show at the gallery.

Calgary features prominently in his exhibition history as well. Trepanier Baer has presented his solo shows since 2005, an ongoing relationship that speaks to consistency rather than novelty. In 2016, “Standing Still” opened at the Denver Art Museum, extending his reach south of the border.

Internationally, the work has travelled further still. Photo Paris LA, the ARCO Art Fair in Madrid, and the Art Fair International in Cologne, Germany, have all hosted Singer’s panoramas, proof that a grain elevator in Saskatchewan can hold its own on a European art fair floor.

Group exhibitions round out the picture: “Architectural Landscapes” at Heather James Fine Art in Palm Desert, California; the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington; Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York City. Earlier in his career, his work reached the Canadian Consulate in New York, the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and Canada House in London, England. A national photographer with an international file.

Gainsborough SK Storm Sky | Danny Singer

Collections & Recognition

Singer’s photographs sit in public collections across the country, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon. Together, these holdings place his work squarely within the national canon of Canadian photography.

His work also belongs to the Crown Collection of the Official Residences of Canada and the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, the kind of placement reserved for artists whose work is understood to represent the country abroad. Add the Denver Art Museum and countless private collections across Canada, the United States, and beyond, and the picture becomes clear.

Recognition has followed accordingly. Multiple Canada Council grants for production and creation. Support from the BC Arts Council. The Hamber Foundation Award of Merit. A career built on cumulative respect rather than a single breakout moment.

A Continuing Project

Now in its twenty-fifth year, the main street project shows no sign of slowing. Singer keeps returning to the same question, town after town: what does a street reveal about the people, geography, and history that shaped it?

Scale gives the answer its weight. Precision gives it its honesty. Together, they have made Singer one of the most distinctive documentarians of a Canadian landscape that is disappearing faster than most of us realize.

Exhibition at Gallery Jones – click for more details on Danny Singer and additional artists HERE.

Author Profile

Helen Siwak, Luxury Lifestyle Observer: Helen Siwak is the founder of EcoLuxLuv Communications & Marketing Inc and publisher of Folio.YVR Luxury Lifestyle Magazine and PORTFOLIOY.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine. She is a prolific content creator, consultant, and marketing and media strategist within the ecoluxury and luxury lifestyle niches. Helen is the west coast correspondent to Canada’s top-read business magazine Retail-Insider, holds a vast freelance portfolio, and is an EIC for Hire. Connect with her here: [email protected].