"Autumn Cabbalism" & "Purple Train" by Roy Arden from
THE WORLD ETC...
January 31 to March 1, 2008
Opening Reception:
Thursday, January 31st, 8-10 pm
"The Monte Clark Gallery Vancouver is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Roy Arden.
Following his mid-career survey exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Roy Arden’s exhibition will feature new graphic works and collages.
The World etc… presents Arden’s latest graphic works (archival pigment prints) that are essentially digital collages, as well as recent small paper collages made from printed matter.
Humans have a need to make images, which begets their collection, storage, ordering, interpretation, and re-use. Yet, there is always an element of folly to any archive, no matter how important or useful. What starts as a rational project invariably grows into a large problem if not an unruly monster. All archives are mirrors of human history.
Arden’s digital and paper collages derive from his archives of images taken from books and magazines as well as his immense archive of images gleaned from the Internet. He mostly collects vernacular (non-art) photo images and since photography is largely synchronous with modernity, his archive and the collages he makes from it reflect modern history. Arden’s sense of history has always been critical in the dialectical sense that Walter Benjamin neatly described in his famous dictum; “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”.
In Arden’s new works, he plays with different ordering systems from quasi-scientific or simple scrapbook grids to complexly layered poetic collage. While each work focuses on a specific theme or subject, as with most of his art - history and modernity are the larger subjects. Many of the works pay homage to artists who have used retrieved imagery and so the history of collage is variously invoked from Picasso and Kurt Schwitters to Rauschenberg and Hans-Peter Feldmann.
Roy Arden's ongoing web project, The World as Will and Representation - Archive 2007 (viewable at royarden.com) presents his personal archive of images gleaned from the Internet..."