Toronto Guide
Toronto
The Toronto Dominion Gallery of Inuit Art
Address: In the South – or Waterhouse – Tower of the Toronto Dominion Centre
Opening time: Mon– Fri 8am–6pm, Sat & Sun 10am–4pm
Price: Free
The Toronto Dominion Gallery of Inuit Art boasts an outstanding collection of over a hundred pieces of Inuit sculpture. Spread over two levels, the collection is owned by the Dominion Bank, who commissioned a panel of experts to celebrate Canada's Centennial in 1965 by collecting the best of postwar Inuit art. The gallery contains examples of all the favourite themes of Inuit sculpture, primarily animal and human studies supplemented by a smattering of metamorphic figures, in which an Inuit adopts the form of an animal, either in full or in part. Other sculptures depict deities, particularly Nuliayuk the sea goddess (also known as Sedna). Inuit religious belief was short on theology, but its encyclopedic animism populated the Arctic with spirits and gods, the subject of all manner of Inuit folk tales. Christianity destroyed this traditional faith, but the legends survived and continue to feature prominently in native sculpture. Most of the pieces are in soapstone, a greyish-blue stone that is easy to carve, but there are bone, ivory and caribou-antler pieces too. The only problem is the almost total lack of labeling with the free introductory booklet, available from the rack at the start of the gallery, providing only limited assistance.