№ 5
Van City Blues
Vancouver images by Roy Arden
—CBC Arts Online
I’ve long admired artist Roy Arden’s work. Many years after we met, he generously passed along a digital file of Typewriter, Vancouver, 1981–85, which became the home page to this site. The text below is the introduction to a photo essay that may be found in full at CBC.ca.
For more than 25 years, Roy Arden’s photographs of Vancouver have acted as a looking glass and a critique: of a city being swept up in transition, torn apart and transformed; of a region often oblivious to its darker, fractious bits of history; and of the practice of contemporary art itself. The Vancouverite has been called a scavenger-archivist, co-opting historical and internet-generated images of everything from Depression-era civil strife to car engines. As an eagle-eyed observer of urban disrepair, suburban sprawl and consumer fancy, he’s dissected Vancouver in ways that find universal meaning in minute local detail.
Roy Arden, the Vancouver Art Gallery’s huge new survey, reaffirms his role at the centre of this city’s widely admired photo-based scene, the so-called Vancouver School of photo-conceptualism. It is Arden’s first major Canadian retrospective and it occupies the museum’s entire third floor, with 120 images drawn from the early 1980s to the present, plus examples of his video art. Arden is also curating a companion exhibit. The opening weekend last month featured a photographic-art summit, including a panel with Arden himself and two of his older peers, Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace.