Opening reception: October 11, 8-10 pm

The Belkin Satellite is pleased to present Roy Arden: Video, the first local exhibition devoted to recent video work by this renowned Vancouver artist. For the past two decades, Arden has built a reputation as one of Canada’s most respected photo-based artists. In an ongoing investigation of the social landscape, Arden’s works have explored the aesthetic economies particular to the re-presentation of archival photographs, serial documentation as well as the large-scale photographic tableaux.

In 2000 Arden began to produce video pieces for both projection and monitor display. The first of these, entitled Citizen is derived from hand-held digital video reportage made from a moving car. The camera attempts to remain centred on a young man, sitting on the median in the middle of a busy intersection, while the car circles around him. Estranged from the manic activity of the everyday economy, he appears out of place – as though transplanted from a Carravaggio painting. Through focused attention an iconic image emerges from the quotidian. Two other works, Juggernaut (2000) and Hole (2002), are fixed position views of their subjects which function as “breathing tableaux.” Arden’s videos are neither narrative nor documentary, they aim instead for an allegorical Realism. This exhibition coincides with a showing of recent photographs at the Monte Clark Gallery through October 26, 2002.

Between 2001 and 2008, the Belkin Satellite operated as an auxiliary space in downtown Vancouver that presented a mix of exhibitions by local artists, new projects by mid-career artists, experimental projects by UBC curatorial studies students, and served as an additional venue for the Belkin’s permanent collection. Its location at 555 Hamilton Street is Vancouver’s most enduring single gallery space as the prior site of the Bau-Xi Gallery from 1964 to 1972 and the Contemporary Art Gallery from 1973 to 2001; in August 2008, the Or Gallery took over the site.