Roy Arden - 75 Years of Collecting - Vancouver Art Gallery

Roy Arden 

Terminal City, 1999 

silver gelatin print on paper 

40.5 cm x 50.0 cm 

Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund 

VAG 2002.29a-p 

75 Years of Collecting 

Vancouver Art Gallery 

1 / 17



Image source: 

http://www.joywebsight.com/images/polaroids/r 

oyarden.jpg 



Artist's Biography 

Nationality: Canadian 

Born: 1957, Vancouver 

Roy Arden was born in 1957 in Vancouver, British Columbia. He graduated from 

Emily Carr College of Art and Design with a diploma in 1982 and received a 

Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 1990. Since the early 

1980s Arden has exhibited extensively in national and international exhibitions. 

Over the past two decades Arden has become one of Canada's most respected 

photo-based artists. Since the early 1990s, Arden has been photographing 

Vancouver's urban environment, which has become the conduit by which he 

explores his interest in local history and modernity. Describing his work from this 

period, Arden states that it "has been my attempt to register the transformative 

effects of modernity as they are revealed in any everyday experience of the 

landscape. Through this work I have also sought to explore and articulate a 

Realism which is informed by my understanding of tradition. I have drawn on 

artists as diverse as [Albrecht] Durer, [Christen] Kobke, [Eugene] Atget, Walker 

Evans, Robert Smithson, and [Per] Pasolini. I see this art history as a toolbox of 

tropes, strategies and devices with which I can interpret my experience." Arden's 

photographs of Vancouver streets, houses and industrial lots are perceptive 

images that investigate the impact of modern and contemporary economies. His 

work often presents images of the present that evidence both traces of the past 

and the abrupt appearance of the new. Arden is interested in documenting the 

"the landscape of the economy" by which he means the social and economic 

history of Vancouver and its surrounding areas. In 2000, Arden began producing 

video works, concerned with many of the same themes as his photographic 

work. 

Source: Acquisitions Justification 

Artistic Context 

Nationality: Canadian 

Training: Emily Carr College of Art & Design; University of British Columbia 

Peers: Stan Douglas; Ken Lum; Howard Ursuliak; Stephen Waddell 

Group: Photoconceptualism; Photography; Video; 20th century; 21st century 

Provenance: 

Subject: Vancouver; urban environment; Vancouver's economic history; urban 

development and decay 

2 / 17





Other Works in the Vancouver Art Gallery Collection 


Rupture, 1985 

silver gelatin print on photo paper — fibre base, photo paper - resin coate 


VAG 86.17 a-i 


Soil Compactor, Richmond, B.C., 1993 

chromogenic print on photo paper - resin coate 


VAG 94.27.1 


Construction Site and "Suntower", Vancouver, B.C., 1992 

chromogenic print on photo paper —resin coate 


VAG 94.27.2 


Pulp Mill Dump (#1), Nanaimo, B.C., 1992 

chromogenic print on photo paper- resin coate 


VAG 94.27.3 


Caribbean Festival (#1), Vancouver, B. C., 1992 

chromogenic print on photo paper — resin coate 


VAG 94.27.4 


Condominium Advertisement, Vancouver, B.C., 1992 



VAG 94.27.5 


Plywood Stacks, Vancouver, B.C., 1991 



VAG 94.27.6 


Landfill, Richmond, B.C., 1991 

chromogenic print on photo paper- resin coate 


VAG 94.27.7 


Tree Stump, Nanaimo, B.C., 1991 



VAG 94.27.8 


Model House and Honda Warehouse, Richmond, B.C., 1993 



VAG 94.27.9 

3 / 17






Museum of Anthropology, UBC, #1,Vancouver, B.C., 1991 



VAG 94.27.10 


Pneumatic Hammer #2, Vancouver, B.C., 1992, 2000 

chromogenic print 

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ken Stephens 

VAG 2001.40.1 


House in Strathcona Alley, Vancouver, B.C., 1995 

chromogenic print on paper 

Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund with the financial support of the Canada 

Council for the Arts Acquisitions Assistance Program 

VAG 2001.42.1 


Landfill, Richmond, B.C., 1991 

chromogenic print on paper 

Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund with the financial support of the Canada 

Council for the Arts Acquisitions Assistance Proqram 

VAG 2001.42.2 



black and white photograph 


VAG 2002.29 a-p 


Jeweller's Vitrine, circa 1983 

azo dye print 

Gift of Bill Jeffries 

VAG 2004.17.1 


Marble, c.1983 

azo dye print on plastic 

Gift of Bill Jeffries 

VAG 2004.17.2 


Soil Compactor, 1992 

giclee on paper 


VAG 2004.37.14 


Citizen, 2000 

DVD for projection 

Purchased with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts 

Acquisition Assistance Program and the Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund 

VAG 2005.15.1 

4 / 17





Bibliography 

Terminal City 

Publication 

1999 

[transcription of excerpt] 

Notes on Terminal City 

"Willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things." 

John Constable 

"In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life." 

Karl Marx 

Since 1991 I have been producing colour photographs under the rubric of the 

Landscape of the Economy. This project has been my attempt to register the 

transformative effects of modernity as they are revealed in an everyday 

experience of the landscape. Through this work I have also sought to explore 

and articulate a realism which is informed by my understanding of tradition. I 

have drawn on artists as diverse as Dürer, Kobke, Atget, Walker Evans, Robert 

Smithson, and Paslini. I see this art history as a toolbox of tropes, strategies 

and devices with which I can interpret my experience. 

Recently, I came to realize that aesthetic problems around the picturesque were 

playing a central role in my work. Rustic motifs or tropes in particular were 

emerging as useful to the problem of depicting traces of the lowest socioeconomic 

strata in the urban landscape as well as the passage of time and 

history. An "urban rustic" emerged as a category necessary to an adequate 

account of modernity. Although a predilection for depicting the lowly or abject 

can be traced to the rhyparography of the Greek painter Piraeicus who painted 

"barber's shops, cobbler's stalls, asses, estables and similar subjects..." it 

appears that Constable is the seminal figure for a modern rustic. The moment 

that low subjects become matter for high art, a trajectory towards the informe is 

initiated. This is the hypothesis that I intuited and sought to examine. 

Terminal City is a suite of black and white photographs I produced in Vancouver 

in 1999. As an appendix to Landscape of the Economy it focuses on the 

particular, aesthetic problem of the rustic. The title derives from an appellation 

denoting Vancouver as the end of the railway line that made Canadian 

Federation a reality. As development of the city today continues at a furious 

pace, the residue of wilderness that survives within the city consequently 

diminishes. Most alleyways have been paved and vacant lots occupied in the 

war against uncultivated nature. The railway lines are the last underdeveloped 

zones and serve as the remaining connection between country and city. Deer 

and cougars still occasionally find their way along these routes to magically 

appear in the middle of the polis. These zones are also the territory of the 

marginal and dispossessed, the refugees from late capitalism. Atget's ragpickers 

have been replaced by the disaffected teenagers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and 

the homeless who scrounge for bottles, cans and scrap metal. 

At the most literal level Terminal City is a view of the city from the bottom, from 

the position of the discarded or rusticated citizen. However, it is also a 

figuration of the slide from Constable to Wols—the rustication of art. I have 

tried to illustrate the historical fall (this evolution could also be imagined as a 

dissolution) from the megalographic to the rhyparographic—from high subjects 

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to low subject, and then the destruction of illusionistic representation itself. This 

decline is presented figuratively through a photographic realism that is limited by 

its intrinsically literary character. Because the new urban rustic appears through 

photography, an aura of forensic evidence has replaced the aura of the beauxarts. 

Terminal City is preordained by historical necessity to read as a crime story 

about modernity and modern art. 

Vancouver, April 1999 

Aspects of the Rustic as Trope 

[One speaks of] "purity" with a people's highly developed sense of language, 

which, in large society, establishes itself, above all, among the aristocratic and 

educated. Here it is decided what is to be considered as provincial, as dialect, 

and as normal; viz, "purity", then is positively the customary usage of the 

educated in society, which received its sanction through the user, and the 

"impure" is everything else which attracts attention to it. Thus the "not-striking", 

is that which is pure. 

(Friedrich Nietzsche, "Description of Ancient Rhetoric") 

"Feeling, but deaf, seeing, but mute, they go their way. "Thus, Walter Benjamin 

on the forces that attract and pull awry. Roused by the influence of entropy on 

both the course of narration and the fated aspect of character in Goethe's 

Elective Affinities, Benjamin's focus is revealing. Bound to the soil and drawn to 

the soil only insofar as cultivation [Bildung] claims both mastery and distance 

from it, one finds hidden within the perspective of the landed gentry an 

indissoluble relation between sublimation and dissolution. Ironically for 

Benjamin, the landed gentry is drawn to the very ground upon which the "pure" 

and the "not-striking" is constituted. Nowhere is this tension better evinced than 

in the proprietary gaze. In typically Goethean fashion this novel turns upon a 

succession of striking scenes, eye-catching perspectives, and picturesque views. 

Forever falling upon the rustic incident, the "aristocratic and educated" claim to 

vision is apparently shot through with the permanence of something like the 

intractable force of gravity. Drawing on the high tradition of the tableau and a 

model of photojournalism, Roy Arden's Terminal City embodies precisely this 

tension. Following Nietzsche one might submit that the striking and the "notstriking" 

are inseparably correlative. In other words the cultivated gaze is one 

continuously struck dumb, pulled downward and askew. The cultivated gaze is 

suspended in a continual state of rustication. 

Terminal City occupies a kind of supplementary position in Arden's work. It 

crystallizes one aspect of his almost ten years of picture making in the environs 

of Vancouver, British Columbia. It is in this sense continuous with the general 

subject matter, motifs, and concerns of his "Landscape of the Economy" series. 

More importantly, however, Terminal City is a formalization of this still ongoing 

project. The Terminal City suite focuses in on a specific aesthetic issue that 

might be usefully summed up as a morphology of the striking; a morphology of 

the striking approach to the practice of depiction one sees in the latter series. 

Never simply the product of a roving or vigi- 

lant "I" on the look out for a good shot, the color photographs from the 

"Landscape of the Economy" series—a photograph like Tree Stump, Nanaimo, 

B. C., 1991 for instance—are rather the product of a subject who has just taken 

a painful shot to the eye. Always transitional sites—landscapes which register 

the economy or history, spaces and objects of modernization as much as 

deterioration—these pictures hinge on the question of the eye-sore: things that 

have struck, hooked, or caught the eye in a prehensile manner. "There are, in 

6 / 17





general, very peculiar magnitudes attached to the objects depicted and the axes 

or direction from which they are seen that set up the conditions of a particularly 

charged specular relation. Terminal City takes up the essentially tropological 

nature of the latter series by literally framing the wider question of salience or 

strikingness in terms of the problem of historical emergence: a problem which is 

always governed by the turn toward the object, i.e., the turn toward rustication. 

Simply put, Arden traces that historical transference or transition from an origin 

in the picturesque to a tendency in the informe. Mirroring an insipid decline that 

proceeds apace with development, Terminal City figures the convention of the 

rustic by narrating the modalities of its progressive enfeeblement. It is a 

peculiarly Western trajectory, the origins of which lead back from our own 

modernity, to the Romantic period, and ultimately to the birth of the ancient 

Hesperos itself. Thus at the very origin of the Platonic city—the city of 

philosophers, Athens—one finds the expulsion or exile of the poets to the 

country. "Sent-down" or "banished" from the polis, what Heidegger calls "the 

place of history, the there in which, from which, and for which history takes 

place"—the poetic condition par excellence is that of rustication. Etymology is 

obviously helpful here. Out of rustication one dregs up a precious, eroded 

history. The crux of Arden's project turns on a self-critical perspective that opens 

up the instant of time to this very history. With an eye for seeking out the signs 

of time—the course of ruination, or of nature in decay more generally—his 

practice turns on the rustication of what Nietzsche calls "the customary usage of 

the educated in society." These pictures circulate between the polarities of high 

and low, and one cannot but be struck by the swift and irresistible attraction that 

continuously pulls them toward the object in its dissolution. 

Rusticity is continually capturing the attention. Functioning in terms of a 

condition of possibility for salience itself, it seems the very motor behind the act 

of conjuration or depiction. In each individual photograph, it is with an almost 

palpable sense of the circuitry between attraction and repulsion that impurity 

strikes that which the eye has already sanctioned as pure, or that the eye is 

drawn down to the level of the detail and raised up again by this self-same 

concentration on the medium. In the Terminal City suite as a whole, narration 

proceeds down a scale of ever worsening notes that turn upon ever heightened 

acts of sublimation. The concomitance of these divergent imperatives is clear. 

An overgrown garage borders on the picturesque. Via a crooked path the 

rusticity of a northern settlement creeps up on the inner city. A miserable 

"queen-size" bed holds court among the weeds. A pathetic array of spent 

condoms shuttle between their abject status and the height of modernist 

abstraction. Quite literally pictures of tropes, one comes upon the rustic 

conventions of Constable, Atget, Zille, Evans, Wols, Pollock, Smithson, Sherman 

and Wall alike, only to stumble over the photojournalistic model in which Arden's 

photographs are uniformly couched. Phenomenologically speaking, the rustic 

turn is the mirror of a continual process 

of falling into time and place. As the turn to consciousness itself, the action of 

rustication is the essential history that Arden's work sounds out. 

Drifting from trope to trope in a periodic and discontinuous progression that 

intends consciousness, transplanted from the rural to an urban setting which the 

cultivated have learned to abhor, the educated viewer is urged through an act of 

mimesis to take up the lowly habits of a tramp. Positioned somewhere between 

the disinterested gaze of the Reverend Gilpin and the furtive glance of a 

ragpicker one roots along picturesque backalleys, through blighted woods, 

vacated sidings, and down eroded trails. Heavy with a sense of the day-to-day 

routine, these are pictures haunted by dispossession. Neither the sublime nor 

the beautiful is at stake here. What is at issue, is the affect-laden charge 

animating the relation between them. This tension, which is central to the 

picturesque, draws the eye continuously down from sublimity toward the object 

of rustication; from a cold and implacable landscape to the object or detail shot 

7 / 17





through with a rough, ramshackle, and often scatological charm. Divided and 

paradoxical, these photographs work hard to body forth a threshold condition. By 

superseding that dialectic which has traditionally structured discussions of 

photography in terms of the binary construction between the document and art, 

they lay bare a kind of fugitive predicament. This fugitiveness, wherein visuality 

swings so wildly between the terms of its possibility that the current on which it 

flows is itself rendered opaque, is central to grasping Arden's work. It is the crux 

of any Realist art worth the name. 

As a rhetorical practice, the essential condition of Realism is an ironic one. It is 

grounded in nothing more nor less than a double bind. It is consubstantial with 

nothing other than the process of historical emergence. Occupying a heterotopic 

condition (both in the individual image and in the suite as a whole), Arden's 

Realism narrates the passing or transitive movement which shuttles a dissolute 

materiality into meaning. This circuitry between opposites underwrites the 

disembedding leap into figuration which is metaphor. As an absence at the heart 

of figuration, a kind of harmonic interval, the transit in question is none other 

than the action or process of turning that is the trope. Holding up a perfect 

mirror to the world, it mouths the riddle with which Nietzsche begins Ecce Homo: 

"I am ... already dead as my father, while as my mother I am still living and 

becoming old". As an embodiment of the exchange relation itself, the condition 

of Realism is a mirror of the subject's own constitution. Terminal City figures the 

passing of a trope. It narrates the modalities of that essential history (now) in 

which being comes to nothing. 

Perhaps the key question with which the viewer is faced hinges upon how one is 

to read this narrative of emergence that is at once a dissolution. The relation to 

the cinematographic and the work of Jeff Wall is obviously important here. More 

to the point is the imperative within photography as "the most transparent of art 

mediums" toward what Clement Greenberg has called the "literary". That the 

arch defender of abstraction in painting should call for photography to be 

"literary" should be of little surprise." The fact is, that unlike the medium of 

painting, photography as a modernist art was felt on the most essential level to 

be constituted through depiction. It was Walker Evans' achievement to have 

struck a deep lyric note within the very form of the prosaic. For a critic who had 

long wished a great realist painter would arrive on the scene possessed of all the 

expressivity of high modernist abstraction, Greenberg's praise for Evans should 

not add to the confusion. Hardly a new Titian, Evans had revealed that the 

historical instant of time housed within it a potentially speculative movement. 

If one views this movement through the optic of Greenberg's commitment to 

color, one might profitably think of this imperative internal to photography's 

indexical sign in terms of a banishment, or indeed rustication from the 

constraints of the Platonic city. As a loss of language's communicative potential, 

a spiraling downward from surface appearance into depth, the time honored 

trope of rustication has since the very dawn of the West, gnawed away at all that 

is "True" and "Good" under the Platonic sun. Set in opposition to the Agora, 

against the academy, and closely allied with Greenberg's own work against 

mimesis, the "literary" in Arden's photography is a meta-temporal movement or 

narrative drive consubstantial with the entropic action of Greenberg's favorite 

word: "dissipate", Though of course, one would have to distinguish Greenberg's 

more thoroughgoing idealism on the question of materialism from that of 

Arden's, which is almost certainly in the tradition of Bataille's base materialism. 

We are confronted by what Yves-Alain Bois has called the imperative toward 

"declass(ify)ing": here, through the caprice of classifying types of subject matter 

that span the history of the trope of rustication. 

If at one time photography was tied in some substantive way to its subject 

matter, in the context of Arden's work the vertiginous aspect of the gaze troubles 

or rusticates the mimetic function all the while keeping the task of depiction 

8 / 17





intact. Arden's is a project steeped within the Realist tradition that strives to 

draw out the idea of mimesis upon which it is based. Much that is tempting to 

read into Arden's work — all that intends upon subject matter and 

thematization; all that emphasizes a moribund social history of the region — can 

be categorically dismissed in terms of its inability to comprehend the level upon 

which history gains entrance, is insinuated within, or has a purchase on the 

practice of depiction. History animates this photography on the most literal level 

of depiction, a mythic level that is one with the constitutive moment of the 

medium and simultaneous to its dissolution. 

Take Hastings Street Sidewalk, Vancouver, B. C., 1996 as only one possible 

ending. Like many of Arden's outdoor pictures it literalizes the process or action 

of turning itself. By undermining a number of established perspectival 

conventions the sidelong glance renders a repressed history in all its immediacy. 

Once the bustling center of Vancouver, now a rotten core, Hastings Street lays 

claim to the corporeal. Marked by a kind of convexity or mounding up of the 

picture plane, the surface itself seems to embody the bulbous pressure of 

watery eyes in a convulsive fit. All one need do is inhabit this hunch-back glance 

in passing ... Eyes askew ... Chest aheave ... Overhanging porticulus ... Tastes 

like bile in the morning to me! Charged with the effects of marginal distortion, 

surfeit with a radical foreshortening and vanishing point too low and too close, 

absolutely loaded with what the great Leonardo described as "every false relation 

and disagreement of proportion that can be imagined in a wretched work," a 

history of the street rises like a sickening lump in ones throat. One can but think 

of Milton in 1642 on the occasion of his rustication from the University of 

Cambridge: not simply "sent down" or "banished" to the country, but as he put it 

"vomited out into a Suburbe sinke". With every look the rustication of the gaze 

renders the cultivated figure an expression of historical will. Mirroring its own 

emergence it seems the figure can but reflect on the root and soil of its own 

history: the striking, the figure-making trope, the dissolute, the informe, the 

rustic. 

Further Reading 

Coleman, A.D. "Roy Arden," The Promise of Photography. Munich: Prestel, 

1998. 

Roy Arden. Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 1993. 

Roy Arden. North York: Art Gallery of York University, 1997. 

Roy Arden: Fragments, Photographs, 1981-1985. North Vancouver: 

Presentation House Gallery, 2002. 

West: Roy Arden. Vancouver: Artspeak Gallery, 1988. 

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Exhibition History 

Exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery 

75 Years of Collecting: The Road to Utopia. September 16, 2006 - January 1, 

2007. 

Selected Exhibitions Outside of the Vancouver Art Gallery 

Centro de Fotografia, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca. Terminal City. 

1999 

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin. Objects in The Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer 

Than They Are. 1999 

Monte Clarke Gallery, Vancouver. Terminal City. Febrary 15, 2000 - March 4, 

2000 

Gilles Peyroulet & Cie, Paris. Roy Arden. April 26, 2000 - May 29, 2000. 

Dee/Glasoe Gallery, New York. Terminal City. 2001 

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham U.K. Roy Arden. February 1, 2006 - March 2006. 

Archival History 

Press Release 

Miscellaneous History 

2000 

[transcription] 

MONTE CLARK GALLERY VANCOUVER 

2339 GRANVILLE ST VANCOUVER BC CANADA V6H 3G4 TEL 604 730 

5000 FAX 604 730 5050 

Roy Arden Terminal City 

February 15 through March 4, 2000 

Opening reception: Tuesday, February 15 6-8 PM Artist will be in 

attendance 

Roy Arden's Terminal City series was previously shown at Max Hetzler Galerie, 

Berlin, and the Centro De Fotografia [Fotographia], Salaminca[Salamanca], 

Spain, which also produced a catalogue devoted to the work. 

Comprised of 16 black and white photographic prints, Terminal City is most 

literally understood as a view of Vancouver from the bottom. Arden has 

photographed those traces of untamed nature that still remain within the 

borders of the expanding city. The alleyways, railway lines, vacant lots and other 

areas that have escaped the attentions of developers and planners constitute a 

sort of shadow realm or otherworld, utilized by society's most marginalized 

people: prostitutes, drug-users, the homeless and teen-agers. Wildlife such as 

coyotes and deer also travel the railway lines that connect country and city to 

10 / 17





magically appear in the middle of the busy polis. The title of the series invoices 

Vancouver's status as the "end of the line"— the terminus of the railway system 

that made Canadian Confederation possible. 

But Terminal City is also an allegory of art's slide from realism to the informe or 

formlessness of postwar abstraction. Arden's compositions and tropes quote 

artists and photographers from Constable to Atget to Wols. The idea is that the 

introduction of low subjects into high art set in motion an unstoppable and 

necessary dissolution of the painted tableau. Arden's previous major Vancouver 

exhibition was of his large colour photographs of the 'landscape of the economy', 

(at the Belkin Gallery at U.B.C.). Terminal City evolved from this work as an 

appendix that addresses the aesthetic category of the 'urban rustic'. 

For further information or visual materials please contact Brad Beattie at 

604.730.5000 

Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday 10 to 6 

Artist will be in attendance 

Newspaper Clipping 


2000 


A terrible Terminal City 

A powerful new body of work by internationally acclaimed photographer 

Roy Arden exposes Vancouver's harsh poverty and endemic drug use. 

TERMINAL CITY 

New photographs by Roy Arden. 

Monte Clark Gallery, 2339 Granville, to Mar. 4. 

MICHAEL SCOTT 

SUN VISUAL ART CRITIC 

We are by nature an optimistic species, moulding our lives to the belief that a 

better tomorrow is just around the corner. For a long time, the road to that 

happy day has led westward, through Avalon and the mystic Misty Isles, to the 

New World and inevitably to this far Pacific shore. And every last one of the 

teeming millions arriving at the western terminus of their journey has imagined a 

better life here. 

How could they not? Look around at the affluent precincts of the city and its 

clear-complexioned burghers, at the traffic jams of luxury automobiles and the 

euphoric crowds of shoppers. Is this not the New Jerusalem, the promised land 

of milk and Prada honey? 

Of course, there is a cost to paving paradise — the downside of putting up the 

parking lot. There is profound poverty here and endemic drug use; there is a 

degraded environment and a cycle of failure and stunted expectation. The same 

11 / 17





optimism that keeps us searching for a better tomorrow can also blind us to 

today's prevailing horrors. 

It is this terrifying frontier between hope and futility that forms the theme of a 

powerful new body of work by Vancouver photographer Roy Arden. Terminal City 

is a suite of 16 black-and-white photographs that leads us down to the wrong 

side of the tracks, to a muddy wedge of alder slash and cardboard shelters that 

is the very end of the line. 

Over much of the past decade, Arden has sought to document the effects of 

development (or "modernism" as he describes it) on the landscape in which we 

live: a body of photographs, entitled Landscape of the Economy, that has 

brought the philosophical artist international attention. Those images of monster 

houses and uprooted woodlots have focused on what our voracious appetites 

have done to the land beneath our feet. The new images of Terminal City look at 

the human costs of progress. 

The bottoming out of individual hopes — abandoning any pretense of 

participating in a cash economy— ends in homelessness and dumpster diving, a 

poverty of the spirit so dire that in going about our daily rounds we either step 

past it, ignoring it, or dismiss it as the unfortunate symptom of mental illness. 

What Arden shows us, in a descending gyre of imagery, is something far more 

abject. The detritus of these lives, lived out amidst rotting mattresses and the 

rag ends of personal possessions, is a sad reminder that the human spirit must 

gutter first before it is completely extinguished. 

Our journey to the end of the road begins with a view of the railway itself, the 

agent that deposited so many hundreds of thousands of newcomers and their 

hopes — on this rain-soaked shore. Arden shows the sweep of the rail line next 

to the grubby consequences — the one a gesture writ large across the face of a 

city; the other a cautionary tale told in individual stanzas. Terminal City No. 2, 

for instance, shows the back of two frame houses, and the rail right-of-way that 

forms their property line. A well-worn path leads down to the rails from the road 

above, through a dense scrub of blackberry bramble. The ground is littered with 

garbage, the area a kind of no-man's-land through which innumerable 

neighbourhood kids have played and platoons of homeless have rummaged. 

Terminal City No. 3 is a closer view of the pathway, showing us a bit of carpet, 

or perhaps a soiled blanket, ground into the dirt. Other views show storage 

sheds, or ramshackle garages, near collapse and muffled with the pernicious 

blackberry brambles that seem a constant clement of Arden's work. The plant 

itself, introduced here from Asia at the turn of the last century, is a relentless 

colonizer, one that frequently establishes itself on disturbed or degraded ground. 

Arden then leads us deeper into the heart of this particular darkness, to the leantos 

and cardboard shelters of its otherwise homeless inhabitants. Whether in a 

roadside wedge of trees or beneath a sheltering loading bay, people have made 

some sad effort to make a room for themselves — a mattress hauled out of 

sight of the roadway; a sleeping bag carefully laid out in the midst of a bramble 

thicket; a few planks and some paper scraps dragged under a loading dock. 

It is hard to know how to take these images, which inspire a wide array of 

emotions. On one hand there is distress at imagining the discomfort of these 

displaced lives; on another a sense of wonder that the human spirit can endure, 

however feebly, in the face of such adversity. Arden himself speaks in terms of a 

variety of rustic life that springs up in the wake of urban development. "Most 

alleyways have been paved and vacant lots occupied in the war against 

uncultivated nature," he writes in a catalogue essay. "The railway lines are the 

last underdeveloped zones and serve as the remaining connection between 

country and city. Deer and cougars still occasionally find their way along these 

routes to appear in the middle 

12 / 17





of the [city]. These zones are also the territory of the marginal and 

dispossessed, the refugees from late capitalism. 

"[The 19th century's] rag pickers have been replaced by the disaffected 

teenagers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and the homeless who scrounge for bottles, 

cans and scrap metal." 

In the end Arden runs us to ground, in the same way that his invisible subjects 

have reached their own last resort. The exhibition's most powerful images are of 

the mud underfoot in these lonely, and woebegone places — a terrain so utterly 

denatured as to make one's heart ache with shame. Here the landscape of the 

primeval forest has been reduced to muddy 

footing for illicit sex with a partner pushed up against a chain-link fence. The 

ground is covered in used condoms, oily rainwater, sodden and pulpy tissues 

and other shards of misery. Words fail to convey the horror of it, Arden seems to 

say in Terminal City No. 14, which shows the busted-up carcass of a typewriter 

sunk in the oozing mud. 

Arden's images are terrifying in their reminder that the end of any road can be a 

bitter place to live. They show us a landscape of failure all the more acute for 

the conspicuous affluence that hems it in on all sides. 

Newspaper Clipping 


2000 

[transcription of excerpt] 

Life on the Edge 

BY SARAH MILROY 

Photography is not always what it seems. In Vancouver, one of the world 

centres for new work in this protean medium, Jeff Wall has for some time now 

been pioneering new photographic hybrids that play fast and loose with our 

conventional notions of realism. Images are digitally combined and reformulated 

in an almost painterly play on time-honoured pictorial traditions. 

Roy Arden, a native Vancouverite more than 10 years Wall's junior, represents a 

countervailing tendency. A photographer, sessional teacher, writer 

and occasional curator of exhibitions, he is doing much to formulate the next 

generation of photo art to come out of the West. 

Like Wall, Arden has a shrewd and diagnostic eye for the cityscape around him, 

and his work of the past nine years — a series titled Landscape of the Economy 

— goes far to map the ravages of economic expansion in the Lower Mainland of 

B.C. But unlike Wall, who creates digital tableaux to respond to just such 

histories or to elaborate his narratives, Arden takes to the streets, camera in 

hand, to see what he can find. 

The results are deeply evocative of the specifics of urban culture in Vancouver. 

His new series, on show at The Monte Clarke Gallery in Vancouver until March 4, 

takes us through a specific aspect of the city: its abandoned railway lines and 

wild urban spaces that harbour both human and animal vagrants. 

The current show, titled Terminal City, takes its name from Vancouver's early 

designation as the end of the railway line. These pictures show us how the city 

remains a kind of end point to this day, a final destination for what Arden 

13 / 17





describes as the "refugees from late capitalism." 

But Arden is tangling with more than just a sense of locale in these pictures. "I'm 

interested in the history of realism that runs through art history from John 

Constable in the 19th century onwards," says Arden, "although of course you 

can say that realism starts with the Romans." 

In particular, Arden has fastened on the idea of the rustic. As he was working on 

Landscape of the Economy, "the rustic just kept cropping up, motifs like the 

bramble hedge or the collapsed hut — images of natural decay or of something 

man made being taken over by nature." The pictures came from Arden's thinking 

about this tradition as he walked the railway lines of Vancouver and explored its 

urban fringes. "As I started thinking and reading about it, I realized that this idea 

also is central to the photography of Atget, or Walker Evans." 

Asked about Terminal City #3, Arden describes the picture as a direct 

descendent of Constable, structured as it is around the winding path that 

"literally drags the viewer's eye through the depth of perspectival illusion" — a 

traditional device of the pastoral picturesque. At the right, we see the spill of 

brambles, the rotting, leaning fence post, and the frame house — a 20thcentury 

update on the British rustic worker's cottage nestled in the bosom of 

nature. 

Arden's work will find detractors in those who quail at his aestheticising of the 

abject. It is an insoluble quandary, but the artist is the first to examine his own 

motives. 

"There was a famous essay written in Constable's day which jumps all over this," 

says Arden, "the argument that 'This is someone else's misery that you are 

making pretty.' But art history is full of this. How do you explain the paradox of a 

beautiful painting of a dead child?" The Impressionists painted factories and 

drunks and beggars, he argues, although that is not normally how they are 

remembered. "As soon as you accept that there are certain things you can't 

show you are in trouble. It's equating the picture with what is being depicted:' 

What is being depicted, in this case, is the landscape of Arden's youth. "Most 

people grow up at the edge of the city, because young families are pushed to 

the margins. I grew up in South Vancouver at Southwest Marine and Cambie," a 

modest residential area bordering on the Fraser River, along which much of the 

city's industry now resides, Arden remembers. "We were surrounded by huge 

vacant lots. Across the street, we could look from our house and see workers in 

coolie hats in the vegetable fields. All of a sudden this all disappeared, and it 

was replaced by car showrooms and McDonald's and furniture showrooms. 

Arden's pictures make us think about the forces that propel such change. We 

are the wiser for it. 

Terminal City continues at the Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver to March 4 

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Acquisitions Justification 

Acquisition Record 

2002 



b. 1957, Vancouver, BC 

Lives and works in Vancouver, BC 


16 black and white photographs 

16 x 20 inches, edition of 3 (framed) 

Vendor: Painter Editions Inc. 

Provenance: The Artist 

Exhibited: Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver; Max Hetzler Galerie, Berlin; 

Dee/Glasoe, New York; and the Centro De Fotografia, Salamanca, Spain, which 

also produced a catalogue devoted to the work. 

Artist Biography 

Photo-based Vancouver artist Roy Arden graduated from Emily Carr College of 

Art and Design with a diploma in 1982 and received his Master of Fine Arts from 

the University of British Columbia in 1990. Since the early 1980s Arden has 

been included in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. His 

solo exhibitions include those at Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Ontario, (2002); 

Dee/Glasoe, New York (2001); Gilles Peyroulet & Cie, Paris (2001); Patrick 

Painter Inc., Santa Monica (2000); Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver (2000); 

Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2000); Centro de Fotografia, 

Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca (1999); lllingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta 

College of Art and Design, Calgary (1998); Art Gallery of York University, Toronto 

(1997); Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia (1997); 

American Fine Arts Co., New York (1996); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver 

(1993); Galerie Giovanna Minelli, Paris (1990); OR Gallery, Vancouver (1990); 

Hippolyte Gallery, Helsinki (1989); Artspeak, Vancouver (1998); YYZ Artists 

Outlet, Toronto (1987); Dazibao, Montreal (1987); Coburg Gallery, Vancouver 

(1985, 1983). Group exhibitions include those at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden 

(2002), Vancouver Art Gallery (2001, 1987, 1984, 1983); Museu d'Art 

Contemporani de Barcelona (2001); Centre national de la photographie, Paris 

(2001); 11th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (1998); Suermondt Ludwig Museum, 

Aachen (1998); Canadian Centre for Contemporary Photography (1997); Musée 

Municipal de La Roche- sur-Yon, and Musée des Beaux-Arts et FRAC Franche- 

Comte, Dole, France (1993); Fotographie Biennale Rotterdam, Perspektief 

(1990); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1989). Arden is represented by Monte 

Clark Gallery. 

Artist in Context 

Since the early 1990s Roy Arden has been making photographs of Vancouver's 

urban environment. Describing his work from this period, Arden states that it 

"has been my attempt to register the transformative effects of modernity as they 

are revealed in any everyday experience of the landscape. Through this work I 

have also sought to explore and articulate a Realism which is informed by my 

understanding of tradition. I have drawn on artists as diverse as Durer, Kobke, 

Atget, Walker Evans, Robert Smithson, and Pasolini. I see this art history as a 

15 / 17





toolbox of tropes, strategies and devices with which I can interpret my 

experience." Arden's photographs of Vancouver streets, houses and industrial 

lots are perceptive images that investigate the impact of modern and 

contemporary economies. 

Work Under Consideration 

Comprised of 16 black and white photographic prints, Terminal City is most 

literally understood as a view of Vancouver looking up from the bottom. Arden 

has photographed persistent "non-progressive" elements that remain within the 

borders of the expanding city: the alleyways, railway lines, vacant lots and other 

areas that have escaped the attention of developers and planners. These areas 

have been allowed to remain as-is because they exist on the margins of the city, 

bordering on a lower socio-economic realm. These spaces are commonly 

inhabited by prostitutes, drug-users, homeless and teenagers, while 

simultaneously providing a pathway between the city and country by which 

wildlife such as coyotes travel. 

The title of this series, Terminal City, invokes Vancouver's status as the locale at 

"end of the line" — the terminus of the railway system that made Canadian 

Confederation possible. It has also been noted that the title is an allegory of art's 

slide from realism to the formlessness of postwar abstraction and the 

introduction of low subjects into high art. Arden engages with these ideas in part 

by quoting other artists and photographers from Constable to Atget to Wols by 

picturing marginal subject matter through an almost forensic methodology. 

Arden's 1997 exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery at UBC of colour 

photographs 

(depicting a 'landscape of the economy') was the jumping off point for Terminal 

City. Terminal City evolved from this earlier series in order to address the 

aesthetic category of the 'urban rustic'. Arden recognized the aesthetic problems 

around representing the picturesque. He writes, "Rustic motifs... were emerging 

as useful to the problem of depicting traces of the lowest socioeconomic strata 

in the urban landscape as well as the passage of time and history. An 'urban 

rustic' emerged as a category necessary to an adequate account of modernity." 

Arden considers these photographs to be "portraits," capable of telling stories of 

times past. For example, some of the houses seen in Terminal City are from an 

early Vancouver era and speak to a time when the economy of this part of the 

west coast was driven by natural resources especially the forest industry. These 

vestiges of history exist in the midst of a furiously developing city and Arden's 

work occupies this moment of tension between stagnation and change, between 

low and high, figuration and abstraction to occupy a critical position on changing 

notions of the modern. 

Justification 

The Vancouver Art Gallery currently has 13 works by Arden in the collection. The 

acquisition of this suite of photographs would significantly enhance the 

comprehensive nature of the Gallery's Arden holdings and bring a more recent 

body of his work into the collection. The work has strong links to other 

contemporary photo-based work in the collection, both by local artists (Christos 

Dikeakos, Stan Douglas, Scott McFarland, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace) as well as by 

international artists (Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff). 

Recommend purchase. 

Daina Augaitis 

Chief Curator/ Associate Director 

Research: Melanie O'Brian 

Assistant Curator 

16 / 17





Terms and Conditions 

The images, texts, documentation, illustrations, designs, icons and all other 

content are protected by Canadian and international copyright laws. The content 

may be covered by other restrictions as well, including copyright and other 

proprietary rights held by third parties. The Vancouver Art Gallery retains all 

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Gallery expressly forbids the copying of any protected content, except for 

purposes of fair dealing, as defined by Canadian copyright law. 

17 / 17

Roy Arden - 75 Years of Collecting - Vancouver Art Gallery

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