Exhibitions
Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design
Against The Day
Roy Arden
June 7–July 16, 2006
Vancouver artist Roy Arden has been making photographic art for over two decades. Against the Day features new color images of everyday subjects. Arden is known for his Realist pictures of what he has termed the landscape of the economy. His pictures of the last decade and a half read history and modernity through the surface of the quotidian.
Arden’s photographs eschew the exotic and spectacular in favor of the seemingly insignificant. He has written; “I am interested in how allegory emerges from the real“. In this exhibition we see some of Arden’s earlier subjects, such as detritus on the street, or the traces of the homeless, but the new pictures of flowers are an intriguing departure. Mostly depicting common hydrangea in an urban context, these images are as austere as any of his pictures.
About these pictures Arden writes: “Flowers have long been exploited as ciphers or metaphors for ideas, emotions, and meanings. They are the first weapon in the arsenal of Realism’s enemy – sentimentality. I saw this subject as a challenge to balance the necessity of Realism with the possibilities of Symbolism“. While one of Arden’s flower pictures presents a Courbet-like voluptuousness, others are ominous, bleak, claustrophobic, or revealed by a brutal daylight.
Biographies
Roy Arden‘s 16 photo suite, Terminal City, was recently purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and included in the inaugural exhibition of the renovated building. His work is included in the exhibition Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists at MuhKA, Antwerp, Dec. 17, 2005-Feb.26, 2006. His mid-career survey featuring photo and video works from 1985-2005 opens at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England in February 2006. A major retrospective is being prepared for the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007.