The Gardiner is thrilled to announce the launch of CLAY, an original in-house restaurant offering seasonal menus of fresh, local fare in collaboration with The Food Dudes.
Closing January 20! The Gardiner has reunited for the first time more than 350 objects from Sir William Van Horne’s exceptional collection of Japanese pottery alongside archival materials and stunning watercolours.
Kids can get creative in our popular March Break camps led by a professional potter. Register your child today for hand building or wheel throwing camp, where they'll learn how to sculpt and glaze their own works of art to take home.
The Gardiner Museum is among the few museums in the world focused on ceramics, and is one of the most important specialty museums internationally. It houses approximately 4,000 objects, including European porcelain, ceramics from the Ancient Americas, Chinese porcelain, Japanese porcelain, and contemporary ceramics. Search the collection online!
Everyone can love clay! Become a Friend at one of the world’s great specialty museums and enjoy the benefits, including unlimited admission, invitations to exhibition previews and special events, discounts on lectures and clay classes, and more.
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.