Roy Arden

This exhibition presents a selection of works from 1991-97 by Vancouver artist Roy Arden.

Co-curated by the Art Gallery of York University and the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia, this exhibition will present a selection of works from 1991-96 by Vancouver artist Roy Arden. 

Arden's subject is the 'landscape of the economy', as it appears through the everyday surface of his local surroundings. His large colour photographs are intended as realist tableaux, they depict traces of history in the present as well as the brutal appearance of the new. Pictures of landfills, proletarian architecture or consumer goods in department stores, are fragments that add up to a vision of modernity's transformative effects. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with colour reproductions and texts by Peter Culley, John Miller and Scott Watson.  

Roy Arden’s work can be found in many public collections in North America and Europe, including The National Gallery of Canada, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. He has exhibited in dozens of international exhibitions from New York to Sharjah, and Berlin to Sydney. In 2007 the Vancouver Art Gallery mounted a survey exhibition, accompanied by a publication covering his work from 1981–2007. He has participated in a wide range of shows form 1979-2024.