It's a familiar setup when interviewing an artist who is about to launch an exhibition of his work. Walk through the gallery with him, pose questions, and then listen to what he has to say about his images. How and when and why they came about. Overarching theme. Where to next. In the case of Roy Arden, whose mid-career retrospective opens at the Vancouver Art Gallery Saturday (October 20) and runs through January 20, the images he's guiding us through are not his own.

Those–120 photographs he's created since 1981, along with five video works and an Internet project–occupy the third floor of the VAG. But at this moment, on the second floor, Arden is busy installing another show, designed to run in concert with his retrospective. "It's called Artist's Choice," he explains to the Straight, adding that it's an example of the complementary exhibition programming practised by, among others, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. "A lot of institutions do it, usually when an artist has a show there."

Subtitled Roy Arden Selects From the Collection, the enterprise is huge: over 100 works, mostly historic and contemporary photographs, along with some paintings, drawings, etchings, serigraphs, and collages, curated by Arden from the VAG's vaults. Artists represented range from Francisco de Goya to Andreas Gursky, Thomas Annan to Ed Ruscha, and Berenice Abbott to Jeff Wall.

Such selections may be as revealing of Arden's thinking about his art as what's installed on the floor above. "I've always seen my work as part of a greater dialogue about culture and art and politics," he says, then adds that his Artist's Choice show will help viewers understand and interpret his work. "And it's just good to do in and of itself, as another hanging of works in the collection." We pass an Emily Carr oil sketch of a logged-over patch of land. "Emily Carr is a big influence on every artist here," Arden observes. "They have to come to terms with her in some way."

The breadth of the exhibition accords with Arden's deep knowledge of the VAG's holdings. "I was born in Vancouver and I've been going to the [Vancouver] Art Gallery since I was maybe 10," he explains. "So I think I've seen almost everything in the collection over the years." As a young boy, he drew and painted and, perhaps more significantly, collected images, initially cutting pictures out of magazines. "I've always been obsessed with the image world," he says. "Period."

As an adult, he began to assemble a file of found images for possible use in collages. A recent manifestation of that impulse, The World as Will and Representation, is an Internet project for which Arden has produced a QuickTime slide show of 28,000 images he found on-line, backed with a 1972 Timmy Thomas song, "Why Can't We Live Together?".

Looking at a 1965 Andy Warhol silk-screen print, Untitled (Birmingham Race Riot), prominently displayed in his Artist's Choice show, Arden says: "This was a really important work for me personally, in that it influenced the work I did in the '80s using archival photographs.”¦It really seared into my consciousness as a youngster." Arden's appropriated historic photos are often juxtaposed with monochrome panels, with subjects including Bloody Sunday, the 1938 assault by police on a peaceful protest by unemployed men in Vancouver; the preliminary stages of the internment by local Japanese Canadians during the Second World War; and a passion play staged for indigenous people at Mission, B.C., in the 19th century. In addition to posing representation against abstraction, these works examine issues of class, race, and colonization.

Social, political, and economic ideas stand behind much of Arden's art, including his black-and-white photos of urban gutters littered with filthy rags, dead birds, squashed paper cups, twigs, and cigarette butts. Crud. Detritus. Garbage. "As soon as people talk about them as garbage, I always think that they miss the point," Arden says. "The whole point of them [the photos] is that there is no such thing as garbage. There's only matter. Terms like garbage are a value judgment." Not incidentally, a small collage of scavenged bits of paper by the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters hangs in the exhibition Arden is curating. "Artists have been engaged in a kind of analysis of the value of matter since the beginning," Arden says. "In the modern period, you just have to think of Kurt Schwitters, whose whole work was made from things he found on the street–normally valueless things which he turned almost alchemically into highly valued objects."

Also in the Artist's Choice show are two colour photos of clearcuts by Lorraine Gilbert. "These are great images that she made as a tree planter in the '80s," Arden remarks. "I was a tree planter myself in the '80s. Lorraine did such a good job of the images of the clearcut, I sort of thought I didn't need to do it myself."

Arden did take a series of colour photos through the 1990s depicting what he calls "the landscape of the economy". He didn't shoot clearcuts, but he took photos of ancient trees knocked down to make way for developments. He recorded old and derelict workers' cottages, newly built monster houses, condominiums under construction, railway yards, landfill sites, and pallets of cheap merchandise at Wal-Mart. "I was reading history through the present," Arden says. "And Wal-Mart, I seized on because I thought it was such a traumatically abrupt, brutal image of the new.”¦It represents the new global economy, I think, quite aptly."