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Contemporary Art Gallery

555 Nelson Street
Vancouver, Canada
Closed for installation
until October 18, 2024

Admission always free
ArchiveExhibition
17 Apr 93until22 May 93

Roy Arden

555 Hamilton St

5 vertical, framed photographic works on a white wall. The three frames in the centre contain 2 photos each, all of construction sites. The two on the ends each have one small photo of a landscape.

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new colour photographs by Vancouver based artist Roy Arden. Arden has been exhibiting for a decade and in the mid-1980s gained an international reputation for his photographic works incorporating retrieved or "appropriated'' archival photographs that encouraged the viewer to reconsider how history is constructed through photography. Arden's work is in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery; Winnipeg Art Gallery; Art Gallery of Ontario; Fond Nationale d' Art Contemporain, Paris; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; and the Foundation de la Photographie, Zurich.

The exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery is Arden's first solo exhibition in Vancouver since 1990. It also marks his return to taking his own photographs. In a departure from traditions of picturesque landscape photography, Arden depicts seemingly anonymous aspects of landscape undergoing transformation such as residential and commercial development sites and waste dumps, and constructs a matrix of images that provoke a reading directed to the social and economic change that continues to affect British Columbia.