The Gardiner Museum celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival with a unique Featured Exhibition by Toronto-based new media artist Clive Holden, on display in the lobby from May 1 to 31. Internet Mountains pairs Holden’s videos and digital paintings with historical objects from the Gardiner Collection, juxtaposing the tangible and the digital.

Holden finds images of mountains on the internet dating from the 19th and 20th centuries––on desktop wallpaper sites and public archives––and manipulates them using graphic design and 3D modelling tools to create fantastical composite landscapes in which historical images are overlaid with sunspots and floating orbs. These circular forms are mirrored by a selection of plates from the Museum’s collections of Chinese, Japanese, and European ceramics, also decorated with landscape imagery.

This is only the second time that the Museum has participated in the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Last year’s highly-acclaimed inaugural exhibition by Chris Curreri also explored the relationship between the flatness of the photographic image and the tactility of clay.

Internet Mountains was organized with the support of Stephen Bulger, co-founder of the CONTACT Festival and one of Canada’s foremost experts on photography.