Workshop Series Description: How to Treat an Image
Photography captures a moment, but what happens when we intervene in that moment? How to Treat an Image is a workshop series exploring physical and conceptual interventions of the photographic image. Through acts of destruction, manipulation and reconstruction, participants will push photography beyond its traditional boundaries, questioning its role as a fixed record.
This series blurs the lines between photography, sculpture and performance, challenging participants to rethink the materiality of a photograph. Whether working with their images or found materials, participants will learn processes that transform photography into a tactile, multidimensional form of storytelling.
Series (all 3 How to Treat an Image Workshops): $310 (Members) / $360 (Non-Members)
Individual Workshop: $100 (Members) / $120 (Non-Members)
Transforming Photographs through Ritual
Explore how ritual actions can transform images through physical alterations—like burning, tearing, shattering, cutting, soaking and scratching—creating works that carry visual and performative meaning. The workshop will discuss the conceptual frameworks behind photographic interventions, examining how physical manipulation can embed personal narrative, memory and emotional resonance into photographic objects. Through hands-on experimentation, create transformed images that expand beyond traditional photographic boundaries. The workshop combines technical instruction with discussions about ritual in contemporary art practice, focusing on how destruction can become a generative act.
Requirements
- Please bring 5-10 printed photographs (can be personal photos, found images, or test prints)
- Basic materials will be provided, but participants are welcome to bring specialized tools
- Please wear clothes suitable for art-making
- No prior experience necessary
Ryan Van Der Hout (b. 1987, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto and New York City whose practice spans photography, public art, and sculpture. They activate material processes to navigate states of being, such as grief, undoing, and queer becoming. Central to Van Der Hout's practice is the innovative use of photographic imagery as a foundational element in creating three-dimensional objects and installations, consistently using the photographic image as a scaffold to create objects that utilize the image as pure material.
Van Der Hout’s work has been widely featured in publications including Time Out NY, NBC News, The Huffington Post, Vogue Italia, Fortune Magazine, Larry’s List, CBC, PhotoEd Magazine and Reader’s Digest. He has exhibited across Canada, The United Kingdom, and New York, most notably in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Collectors Series, as part of a Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival primary exhibitions, and in The Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward festival. They have created public art for Washington Square. Park, NYC Parks, the City of Toronto, Toronto Archives, The TTC, Nuit Blanche and Pemberton Developments. Van Der Hout was awarded the Emerging Artist Award by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council. Van Der Hout has spoken at Columbia, TMU, The New School and OCAD.
