At the Vancouver Art Gallery until January 2

It's a well-worn statistic, but it works here: the average North American sees up to 3,000 advertising images a day. Contemporary culture demands that consumers become human filters, whittling down massive quantities of news items, money grabs, product spots, banner ads, and so on (and on). In the face of this landfill-like mass of information, the details of one person's life might become at best slightly obscured, and at worst seemingly insignificant.

Enter Classified Materials, the expansive group show currently occupying the second and third floors of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The exhibition, which includes works by 44 internationally recognized contemporary artists, focuses on the phenomenon of the artist as archivist, as the interpreter and organizer of infinite sources of information and product. The artists and curators of Classified Materials provide a wealth of opportunities for introspection and, importantly, they remind us that even the most staggering of statistics leave room for a sensitive portrait of the individual in the modern world.

Predictably, many of the works rely on sheer numbers. From Robyn Laba's stunning monochromes (made from thousands of rubber balloons mounted to "canvases") to Gerald Ferguson's mind-boggling and self-explanatory 1,000,000 Pennies to Roy Kiyooka's pensive snapshot series, artists reveal through accrual both the beauty and perversity of contemporary experience. The most striking is the presentation of The Great Survey of Papercuttings in Yanchuan County, the result of curator Lu Jie's retracing of Chairman Mao Zedong's Long March of 1934 to 1935. The installation occupies three massive walls and is visible from both an upper balcony and from the gallery floor. From either vantage point, it is an impressive display. The survey incorporates hundreds of paper cuttings by residents of China's Yanchuan County, one of the regions where Mao's beleaguered troops passed through. Uniformly created in red, it refers to the fervour of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, at the same time as it illustrates the complexities of presenting folk traditions in a contemporary-art context. Lu Jie's accumulations expose the shortcomings of the archive: despite its numerical scale, the "study" remains ever incomplete, each meticulous, individually-made work resisting the homogenizing effects of the whole.

Marginalized histories are also a common muse. Roy Arden's re-presentation of photographs of the ill-fated ship Komagata Maru, Jin-me Yoon's archive of images from the Korean War, or Christian Boltanski's portraits of child murder victims-all of these revisit identities traditionally underrepresented by the mainstream. Ramallah-born artist Emily Jacir's Inbox eloquently combines personal history with references to Middle East politics. The work consists of 45 hand-painted transcriptions taken from the last eight years of the artist's e-mail correspondence. It details both personal and global events, including 9-11, a close friend's breakup, and the most recent intifada. Much of the text is highly politicized, and personal exchanges between friends mingle with an overt criticism of Israeli occupation. Viewers will recognize the telltale signatures of familiar Web-mail hosts (AOL, Yahoo!, and the like), but Jacir's uneven, painted texts infuse them with a profound pathos. Inbox is the confluence of several streams of inquiry-political, social, and emotional-and it emerges as a document of resistance, not only against specific political forces, but against the dehumanizing effects of mass culture at large.