The Gardiner Museum is open seven days a week! Explore our permanent collection, discover special exhibitions, and get hands-on with clay in our studios. We look forward to welcoming you.
Discover an exhibition of new work in our lobby by members of Inspirations Studio, a unique low-barrier ceramics program in Toronto for women and gender diverse people who have experienced marginalization.
Our Joy of Ceramics fundraiser returns on October 27, featuring a presentation by Sarah Milroy, Chief Curator at the McMichael Gallery, who will talk about a work by Shary Boyle, including its many meanings and her decision to donate it. This event sells out every year!
Every object in our permanent collection can be accessed through our eMuseum portal. Learn about individual collecting areas, like Italian Maiolica or Modern and Contemporary Ceramics, or search the full collection by keyword. You'll be amazed by what you discover!
Help us continue to offer innovative and engaging exhibitions, programs, and community projects in person and online, as well as plan for the future. Please consider making a donation today.
Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Featured Exhibition
During weekly classes at the Gardiner Museum, Chris Curreri photographed students’ wet and discarded projects. The resulting series of photographs, Untitled (Clay Portfolio), focuses on the material of clay as it shifts between states of form and states of formlessness. Some of the prints in the series have a subtle solarization effect—a phenomenon in photography in which the image is wholly or partially reversed in tone by exposing the print to light during the development process.
This process underscores a correspondence between the photographic darkroom and the pottery studio by emphasizing the brief moment where the latent image is still malleable and has yet to be fixed to the photographic paper. The images themselves, depict raw material in different states: fresh and untouched clay; bowls and other identifiable objects left discarded in a pile; and the stuffing of this discarded matter into a machine that compresses and extrudes it as new, usable material. One thing is not depicted in the photographs: the moment when the material becomes a calcified, acceptable thing.
The portfolio will be accompanied by a new sculptural work titled That, There, It that elaborates on the relationships between raw material, latency, and fixed (or fired) finality.
About the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival
Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival is an annual event in May with well over 1500 Canadian and international artists and photographers exhibiting at more than 175 venues throughout the Greater Toronto Area. Founded as a not-for-profit organization in 1997 and now a charitable organization, the Festival is devoted to celebrating, and fostering the art and profession of photography, through a diverse range of programmes.
As a leading proponent of photography, the Festival increases exposure and recognition for local, Canadian and international artists and is committed to advancing knowledge, creativity and innovation in photography. It stimulates excitement and discussion among a diverse audience that has grown to over 1.8 million. CONTACT is the largest photography event in the world, and a premiere cultural event in Canada.