The MONTE CLARK GALLERY is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by
Roy Arden.

MONSTER HOUSE — Selected Works from the 1990’s
Roy Arden
November 27 – December 23, 2004

Opening reception: Saturday, November 27, 2004 from 2:00 – 4:00pm.
Artist in attendance.

In 1991 Roy Arden began his exploration of what he referred to as ‘the landscape of the economy’ by photographing in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. This exhibition features a group of these rarely seen images. The first ‘monster house’ in British Columbia was made by a Haida Chief at Massett on Haida Gwaii. Constructed in response to a leadership challenge, Chief Wiah’s house could hold one hundred people. The Museum’s rich displays of oversized Potlatch bowls, and other ceremonial objects, are evidence of a culture as in thrall to spectacular display and expenditure as the culture that sought to conquer it.

The Anthropological Museum is not just a display of First Nations culture, but also a register of how that culture has been treated by the European settlers. Both a monument to colonialism and a place of enlightenment, the Museum has sought to examine itself and address the wrongs of the past. However, photographs of the Anthropological Museum produced by the museum itself usually seek to advertise a spectacular ‘experience’. Arden tried instead to make photographs of the Anthropological museum that are ‘anthropological’. He wanted to balance an interest in the artifacts with an interest in the museum itself. The stantions, didactic panels and the apparatus that support the slowly disintegrating cedar objects were his subject as much the artifacts themselves.

The trees that helped to sustain Native life and culture also provided for the European settlers. Most of Arden’s pictures from this period depict this “primary resource” in one form or another. One could say that he was studying the many uses of wood, whether transformed into totem pole, plywood, pulp, house, detergent box, or exchanged for things made of other materials. After the model of Walker Evans and others, Arden’s Realism is dispassionate. The photos made in a local Wal-Mart store might at first elicit reference to Warhol’s Pop Art, but were intended as a counter to Pop’s cheerfully ironic repackaging of consumerist spectacle. In Arden’s Wal-Mart pictures he retained the worldly context that Pop Art always excludes. The similarities between the pictures of store and museum evoke the ongoing relation between enlightenment and commerce that marks modernity.

Most of Arden’s work, through its various strategies, has engaged in a description of the epic that is this place. While, as an artist, he is not immune to the drama, he has strived to maintain a critical, historic consciousness. A lucid Realism, like anthropology, tries to take a step back from the scene to see it better.

Roy Arden is a Vancouver artist working with photography and video who has been exhibiting internationally for over two decades. His work is in the collections of national and international museums including the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He will have a show of new work at Monte Clark Gallery in Toronto, and is included in the exhibition Covering the Real at the Kunstmuseum, Basel, both in the Spring of 2005.

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