Roy Arden has been active as an internationally exhibiting artist since the late 70s. He has played a major part in the development of Vancouver as an internationally recognized centre for the production of contemporary photo art. Regularly seen in significant local, national and international exhibitions, Arden's work is included in important museum collections in Canada, Europe and the U.S.A., including The Art Gallery of Ontario, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.
From 1981 to 1985, Arden produced a body of photographs entitled Fragments. These were small colour (cibachrome) photographs of a lyrical nature, which recorded live experience in the form of portraits and studies of urban details. These photographs were made in the artist's home of Vancouver as well as in various European cities. Balancing a personal lyricism and a dispassionate view of the everyday, Fragments can now be seen as a record of the Zeitgeist of the early 1980s. Like much art of the time, Fragments looked to models from the historical avant-gardes, in this case to the New Objectivity and Surrealism.
In 1985, Arden made an abrupt shift away from traditional art photography. Until around 1990, he used historical photographs from the local archives in combination with other materials to create series and installations as catalysts for discourse on social history and photography. For example, the work Abjection (1985) was both an elegy for the internment of Japanese-Canadians in 1942 and a musing on the ontology of the photographic. This work can be seen as a new kind of problematised 'history painting.'
After 1990, Arden's interest in local history and modernity would be pursued through images of the present as he returned to making his own photographs. These pictures reveal both traces of the past and the abrupt appearance of the new. Their subject is the social and economic history of Vancouver and its environs; what he has termed 'the landscape of the economy,' articulated in tableaux influenced as much by the history of painting as the traditions of artistic photography. A photograph such as Landfill, Richmond B.C. (1991) is an image informed by a contemporary ecological consciousness but also invokes the problematic history of the picturesque landscape.
Around 1999 – after a decade of colour work, Arden turned to black and white photos because he felt that colour is often read as a transparent, unmediated representation. Until about 2005, his focus tended toward intimate but austere studies of everyday phenomena like weeds, flowers and gum spots on the pavement. In 2000, Arden began to produce video works, which extended his project into the durational image. These works are not narrative, but are instead a sort of 'breathing tableaux.' Of the video Citizen (2000), Arden has written: "My intention with this video was not documentary; I am interested instead in an allegorical realism that emerges from concentrated attention." His continuing work with photography has increasingly moved toward a close reading of material phenomena.
Arden's interest in the new world of imagery on the Internet has manifest itself as the project "The World as Will Representation – Archive (2007)". Essentially a slide show of his personal archive of 28,000 images gleaned from the Internet, it is viewable at www.royarden.com. Although he has long made collages and worked with retrieved images, since around 2007 he has concentrated on digital collages derived from his growing electronic image archive. Arden's blog, UNDERTHESUN, began in 2009 and acts as a kind of scrapbook for his working process.