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Roy Arden
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
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Roy Arden has been active as an internationally exhibiting artist since the late 70’s. He has played a major part in the development of Vancouver as an internationally recognized centre for the production of contemporary photographic art. Regularly seen in significant local, national and international exhibitions, Arden\’s work is included in important museum collections in Canada, Europe and the U.S.A., including The Art Gallery of Ontario, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Arden exhibited recent work, Against the Day at the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver 2006 and at the Monte Clark Gallery in Toronto. The Vancouver Art Gallery will present a mid- career survey of his work in 2007.
Arden’s work can be divided into three periods from 1981 to the present. From 1981 to 1985 He produced a body of photographs entitled Fragments. These were colour photographs of a lyrical nature which recorded lived experience in the form of portraits and studies of urban details. Although he later sought a less subjective mode, Arden sees Fragments as important for developing his pictorial skills.
The second period, from 1985 to 1990 was spent engaged in what Arden has referred to as \’meta-photography\’, meaning that he did not act in any traditionally defined role as a photographer but instead made art about photography. He used historical photographs from the local archives in combination with other materials to create series and installations as catalysts for discourse on social history, photography and their interrelation.
The third period begins in 1990 and extends to the present. These pictures present evidence of the social and economic history of Vancouver and it\’s environs, what he has termed ‘the landscape of the economy’, in tableaux influenced as much by the history of painting as the traditions of artistic photography.
Arden’s recent interest in the new world of imagery on the internet has manifest itself as the project “The World as Will and Representation – Archive (2004)”. Essentially a slide show of his personal archive of 10,000 images gleaned from the internet, it is viewable at www.royarden.com.