A founding member of Vancouver's conceptual photography coterie with Jeff Wall, Lucy Pullen, and Alex Morrison, Roy Arden has exhibited internationally since the '70s. The Vancouver Art Gallery's mid-career overview of more than 100 photographs surveys Arden's work from 1980 to the present. Arden's work in the '80s emphasized the conceptual underpinnings of the medium, but by the '90s he had moved on to large-format color works documenting Vancouver's rampant but dreary modernization. In one such work, Development , Arden depicts a denuded landscape with rows of townhouses under construction. Although the photograph resembles a traditional landscape, with the inclusion of his own shadow in the foreground Arden critiques the pieties of traditional image-making that demand the artist's absence.

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