Associated with the Vancouver photo-conceptualist movement, Arden’s work explores social and political issues relating to the urban environment and the history of Vancouver. His poetic sensibility is seen in the series Fragments, 1981–85, which consists of tightly framed images of everyday subjects, including figures from the city’s artistic community. In the mid- to late 1980s, Arden made a series of archival works in which he appropriated news photographs to comment on events in Canadian history. Rupture, 1985, considers the class struggle at the heart of Vancouver’s 1938 labour protests, while Abjection, 1985, is a melancholic reflection on the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. In Komagata Maru, 1985, Arden recalls Canada’s anti-Asian immigration policies and omissions in the historical record.

Image: Roy Arden, Komagata Maru (detail 2), 1985, eighteen diptych panels with gelatin silver prints, exposed photo paper, white ink, 40.7 x 25.4 cm each, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

For further reading, see:

Arden, Roy, and Peter Culley. Roy Arden: Fragments. Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 2000.

Ferguson, Russell. “From Fragments.” In Roy Arden: Against the Day, 68–93. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery and Douglas & McIntyre, 2007.

Strom, Jordan. “Ruptures in Arrival: Art in the Wake of the Komagata Maru.” In In the Wake of the Komagata Maru: TransPacific Migration, Race, and Contemporary Art, edited by Lisa Marshall with Jordan Strom, 8–15. Surrey: Surrey Art Gallery, 2015.

Wood, William. “The Difference of Times.” In SightLines: Reading Contemporary Canadian Art, edited by Jessica Bradley and Lesley Johnstone, 329–34. Montreal: Artexte Information Centre, 1994.