Roy Arden: New World Order
Roy Arden, Autumn Cabbalism, 2007
The human impulse to organize, order and archive is a strong one: from family photo albums and LP record collections, to public archives and library card catalogues, organizational systems abound in both our public and private lives. The advent of digital archiving systems promised to make these collections more manageable and accessible but, as any visit to Google Images makes clear, digital ordering systems can quickly become unruly. Connections between images and their original contexts of production and circulation are quickly severed, allowing contemporary Web-savvy artists to make clever interventions into the logic of the archive.
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Roy Arden, The Terrible One, 2007 |
“The World etc…”, a solo exhibition by Vancouver-based artist Roy Arden currently on view at Toronto’s Monte Clark Gallery, turns the digital image archive upon itself in a selection of clever and visually overwhelming collages from Arden’s own personal archive of more than 28,000 images gleaned from the Internet. Just as his past photographic works investigated how images of the landscape reflected political and economic realities, this most recent body of work examines how archives and ordering systems mirror the history of modernity. Based on his ongoing web project The World as Will and Representation – Archive 2007 (which can be viewed at royarden.com), “The World etc…” showcases both collages of digital images on paper and hand-made collages from printed matter that are loosely grouped around forms, themes or categories. The Terrible One, for instance, offers a checkerboard survey of internal combustion engines, while the more menacing Basic Anatomy presents a grouping of snake-like exhaustion pipes, mufflers and plumbing. Despite their seemingly arbitrary relationship to one another, Arden’s collaged images reveal idiosyncrasies in our organizational systems and make explicit the ideological foundations of our archival impulses. (55 Mill St, Toronto ON)
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Roy Arden, Like a Wheel or the Sun, 2007 |
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