Roy Arden’s mid-career survey features the three major phases of the Vancouver-based artist’s work, from the 1980s archival photographs that deal with the social history of British Columbia, to the ‘landscape of the economy’ colour photographs that read modernity through the surface of the everyday, to the newer work featuring mundane, ‘urban-rustic’ subjects such as weeds, gutters, street corners and common scrappy flowers.

Arden’s work rejects the exotic and spectacular as it tracks modernity in the everyday and the global in the local.

Rather than engaging the rhetoric of documentary, Arden’s art always aims to construct the real.

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition at Ikon Gallery, 1 February – 19 March 2006.