Vikky Alexander (born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1959) is a Canadian contemporary artist based in

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

British Columbia British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...

. She has exhibited internationally since 1981 as a practitioner in the field of photo-conceptualism, and as an

installation Installation may refer to: * Installation (computer programs) * Installation, work of installation art * Installation, military base * Installation, into an office, especially a religious (Installation (Christianity) Installation is a Christian li ...

artist who uses photography, drawing, and collage. Her themes include the appropriated image, and the deceptions of nature and space. Her artworks include mirrors, photographic landscape murals, postcards, video and photography.

Background

Alexander was born in

Victoria, British Columbia Victoria is the capital city of the Canadian province of British Columbia, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific coast. The city has a population of 91,867, and the Greater Victoria area has a population of 397,237. Th ...

, Canada and is a graduate of the

Nova Scotia College of Art and Design NSCAD University, also known as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design or NSCAD, is a public art university in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The university is a co-educational institution that offers bachelor's and master's degrees. The univ ...

from which she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1979. She is known for her large scale photo-mural installations and multimedia art that combine photography with sculptural objects. These works foreground a strong interest in the history of architecture, the fields of design and fashion supported by the production of drawing and collage. Alexander's use of modernist architecture and industrial design have explored issues of artifice and representation. Her early work informed the movement of

Appropriation art Appropriation in art is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. The use of appropriation has played a significant role in the history of the arts (literary, visual, musical and performing arts) ...

in the early 1980s for which she is historically recognized as the youngest innovator of the tendency alongside

Richard Prince Richard Prince (born 1949) is an American painter and photographer. In the mid-1970s, Prince made drawings and painterly collages that he has since disowned. His image, ''Untitled (Cowboy)'', a rephotographing of a photograph by Sam Abell and ...

Louise Lawler Louise Lawler (born 1947) is a U.S. artist and photographer living in Brooklyn, New York.Louise Lawler ...

Barbara Kruger Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945) is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her collage style that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captio ...

and

Sherrie Levine Sherrie Levine (born 1947) is an American photographer, painter, and conceptual artist. Some of her work consists of exact photographic reproductions of the work of other photographers such as Walker Evans, Eliot Porter and Edward Weston. Early ...

. Alexander's more recent body of work uses collage and digital transfer technology onto printed canvas. Since 1992 Alexander has been a professor of photography in the Visual Arts Department at the

University of Victoria The University of Victoria (UVic or Victoria) is a public research university located in the municipalities of Oak Bay and Saanich, British Columbia, Canada. The university traces its roots to Victoria College, the first post-secondary instit ...

in Canada. Alexander has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo exhibitions including "CEPA", Buffalo 1983,

New Museum The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is a museum in New York City at 235 Bowery, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. History The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Center of the then-named New Sc ...

, New York City 1985,

Kunsthalle Bern The Kunsthalle Bern is a ''Kunsthalle'' (art exposition hall) on the Helvetiaplatz in Bern, Switzerland. It was built in 1917–1918 by the Kunsthalle Bern Association and opened on October 5, 1918. Since then, it has been the site of numerous ex ...

, Bern 1990,

Vancouver Art Gallery The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) is an art museum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The museum occupies a adjacent to Robson Square in downtown Vancouver, making it the largest art museum in Western Canada by building size. Designed by Franc ...

, Vancouver 1992 and 2019, Ansel Adams Center, San Francisco 1992,

Mercer Union Mercer Union is a Canadian artist-run centre in Toronto, Ontario, established in 1979 to exhibit contemporary art. History Mercer Union was founded in 1979 by artists Michael Balfe, Peter Blendell, Ric Evans, Peter Hill, Jamie Lyons, David MacW ...

, Toronto 1993,

Presentation House Gallery The Polygon Gallery (formerly known as the Presentation House Gallery) is an art gallery in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atla ...

, Vancouver 1996,

Art Gallery of Windsor Art Windsor-Essex (AWE) (formerly known as the Art Gallery of Windsor) is a not-for-profit art institute in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Established in 1943, the gallery has a mandate as a public art space to show significant works of art by local ...

, Windsor 1998,

Contemporary Art Gallery A contemporary art gallery is normally a commercial art gallery operated by an art dealer which specializes in displaying for sale contemporary art, usually new works of art by living artists. This approach has been called the "Castelli Method" ...

, Vancouver 1999,

Catriona Jeffries Gallery Catriona Jeffries is an art gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia, that has been in operation since 1994. It focuses on the post conceptual art practices which have emerged from Vancouver and the critical relationships between these practices an ...

, Vancouver,

National Gallery of Canada The National Gallery of Canada (french: Musée des beaux-arts du Canada), located in the capital city of Ottawa, Ontario, is Canada's national art museum. The museum's building takes up , with of space used for exhibiting art. It is one of the l ...

, Ottawa 2000, State Gallery, Vancouver 2004, Trepanier Baer Gallery, Calgary 2009,

Massey University Massey University ( mi, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa) is a university based in Palmerston North, New Zealand, with significant campuses in Albany and Wellington. Massey University has approximately 30,883 students, 13,796 of whom are extramural or ...

, Wellington 2010. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions:

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

, New York,

Dia Art Foundation Dia Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that initiates, supports, presents, and preserves art projects. It was established in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, the daughter of Houston arts patron Dominique de Menil and an heiress to the Schlumb ...

, New York, Yokohama Civic Art Gallery, Yokohama,

Barbican Art Gallery The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London and the largest of its kind in Europe. The centre hosts classical and contemporary music concerts, theatre performances, film screenings and art exhibi ...

, London,

Taipei Fine Arts Museum The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM; ) is a museum in Zhongshan District, Taipei, Taiwan. It is in the Taipei Expo Park. The museum first opened on August 8, 1983, at the former site of the United States Taiwan Defense Command. It was the first ...

Taipei Taipei (), officially Taipei City, is the capital and a special municipality of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Located in Northern Taiwan, Taipei City is an enclave of the municipality of New Taipei City that sits about southwest of the n ...

Seattle Art Museum The Seattle Art Museum (commonly known as SAM) is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington, United States. It operates three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Volunteer Park on Cap ...

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

and in 2021, her work was included with

Edward Burtynsky Edward Burtynsky (born February 22, 1955) is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes. His works depict locations from around the world that represent the increasing development of indust ...

, Jane Buyers and others in ''Making Space'' at the

Art Gallery of Nova Scotia The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS) is a public provincial art museum based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The art museum's primary building complex is located in downtown Halifax and takes up approximately of space. The museum complex compr ...

, Halifax. She was also included in the comprehensive exhibition ''Intertidal'' of

Vancouver School The Vancouver School of Conceptual art, conceptual or post-conceptual photography (often referred to as photoconceptualismSarah Milroy "Is Arden our next greatest photographer?" ''Globe and Mail'' (October 27, 2007): R1.) is a loose term applied t ...

artists held at MuHKA in

Antwerp Antwerp (; nl, Antwerpen ; french: Anvers ; es, Amberes) is the largest city in Belgium by area at and the capital of Antwerp Province in the Flemish Region. With a population of 520,504,

in 2004. This exhibition was influential in two prominent art movements, one in New York, N.Y. (USA) and the other in Vancouver, B.C. (CAN); an earlier body of her work emerged from Appropriation Art while her later artworks deepened the language of Photo-conceptualism, which was part of a photography group known internationally as the Vancouver School. Institutional collections of her work can be found in the

Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's or ...

, the

International Center of Photography The International Center of Photography (ICP), at 79 Essex Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City, consists of a museum for photography and visual culture and a school offering an array of educational courses and programming. ...

in New York City, the

in Ottawa, and at the

Deste Foundation Deste Foundation, Centre for Contemporary Art is an arts foundation in Nea Ionia, a northern suburb of Athens, Greece. Housing the art collection of Greek businessman Dakis Joannou, it organizes exhibitions with the collection and commissions new w ...

, Athens. Alexander is represented by Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary, Wilding Cran, Los Angeles, Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Downs & Ross, New York.

Press

The

artist and writer, Ian Wallace relates her work to

"an expression of the imaginary, wherein fantasies of hope and utopia are acted out in the daydreams that call reality into question. These are collective fantasies and are linked to popular taste for images that transcend the everyday. The images of extreme beauty, which are ubiquitous in commodity culture, function as a cult of escape from the everyday. While the aspiration of much conceptual art has been to present critical images that contradict and shatter these fantasies with the force of reality, Vikky Alexander’s work projects the raw indulgence that exists on the inside of these fantasies, heightening our apprehension and anxieties of them from within."

Conceptual artist and critic

Dan Graham Daniel Graham (March 31, 1942 – February 19, 2022) was an American visual artist, writer, and curator in the writer-artist tradition. In addition to his visual works, he published a large array of critical and speculative writing that spanned ...

has remarked on the context of design in her work and its relationship to audiences in the 1980s.

“Two-dimensional design can be used to reflect corporate identity, social/political identity and individual identity. Examples of graphic markers of individual identity (which often serve to correlate that identity to corporate or social/political interests) are personalized T-shirts, personal stationery and business cards, greeting cards and the like. (T-shirts imprinted with logotypes are a good example of either corporate or social identities being used by individuals as a sign of individual identity.) These “personal” items mark an “individual” identity that is socially prescribed by convention and commercial systems of exchange. Recently, Alexander with
Louise Lawler Louise Lawler (born 1947) is a U.S. artist and photographer living in Brooklyn, New York.Louise Lawler ...
,
Kim Gordon Kim Althea Gordon (born April 28, 1953) is an American musician, singer and songwriter, best known as the bassist, guitarist, and vocalist of alternative rock band Sonic Youth. Born in Rochester, New York, she was raised in Los Angeles, Califor ...
, Michael Asher have designed cards, interiors and matches for individual clients. These “products” are neither part of commercial mass production nor designed for gallery exhibition and sale as art objects. They set up a peculiar and ambivalent relation between artist and client . . . Thus the kind of designer-client relationship that is constructed inherently questions values of both “design” and art receivership, in psychological as well as social/esthetic terms.”

The American curator,

Dan Cameron Dan Cameron (born February 12, 1956 in Utica, New York) is an American contemporary art curator. He has served as senior curator for Next Wave Visual Art at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), an annual exhibition of emerging Brooklyn-based artists ...

wrote in a review of her large scale installation work titled ''Lake in the Woods'' from 1986:

Vikky Alexander’s narrow gallery environment consisting of an idyllic photo-mural diptych, which faces a large prefabricated wall unit, this in turn supporting a row of mirror panels at shoulder height. Only by standing at either end of the room could one take in the entire piece: nature as decorative artifice, figment of a universally synthetic consciousness.Cameron, Dan. "Review." Flash Art. February/March 1987.

References

Publications

* Alexander, Vikky, and Ian Wallace. ''Vikky Alexander: Vaux-le-Vicomte Panorama''. Vancouver:

, 1999. * Alexander, Vikky. ''Vikky Alexander: Lake in the Woods''. Vancouver:

, 1992. * Alexander, Vikky. ''Beneath the Paving Stones''. Vancouver: Charles H. Scott Gallery, 1994. * Augaitis, Daina. ''Reconnaissance: Three Panoramic Views: Vikky Alexander, Ray Arden, Jamelie Hassan''. Banff:

Walter Phillips Gallery The Walter Phillips Gallery (WPG) is a contemporary art gallery in Banff, Alberta. It was established in 1976 as a part of The Banff Centre in Banff National Park. History and mission Walter J. Phillips was a printmaker and painter, from the ...

, 1987. * Cameron, Dan. "Post Feminism".

Flash Art ''Flash Art'' is a contemporary art magazine, and an Italian and international publishing house. Originally published bilingually, both in Italian and in English, since 1978 is published in two separate editions, Flash Art Italia (Italian) and Fl ...

. February/March 1987. * Ferguson, Bruce W., and Gary Dufour. ''Pastfuturetense: Vikky Alexander, Kari Cavén, Ronald Jones, Rui Sanches, Erwin Wurn, Klaus Von Bruch, David Diao, Jac Leirner, Barbara Todd''. Winnipeg:

Winnipeg Art Gallery The Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) is an art museum in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Its permanent collection includes over 24,000 works from Canadian, Indigenous Canadian, and international artists. The museum also holds the world's largest collect ...

, 1990. * Ferguson, Bruce W. ''Vikky Alexander: Glass Sculpture''. Bern:

, 1990. * Graham, Dan. "Signs."

Artforum ''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notabl ...

. April 1981 * Hagen, Charles. "Commodity Image." ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

''. 1993. * Linker, Kate. "Review." ''Artforum''. March 1985. * O'Brien, Melanie, and Vikky Alexander. ''Vikky Alexander''. Vancouver, B.C.: Catriona Jeffries Gallery, 2000. * Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. ''Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices''. Media & society, 4. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press The University of Minnesota Press is a university press that is part of the University of Minnesota. It had annual revenues of just over $8 million in fiscal year 2018. Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is best known for its book ...

, 1991. * Wallis, Brian. ''Vikky Alexander''. Calgary: Stride Gallery, 1989. * Watson, Scott, and Dieter Roelstraete. ''Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists''. Vancouver:

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the campus of the University of British Columbia. The gallery is housed in an award-winning building designed by architect Peter Cardew and o ...

, 2005.

External links

* http://hereelsewhere.com/see/vikky-alexander/ * http://www.flaskpublishing.com/flask.html
CCCA Profile of Vikky Alexander

Trepanier Baer Profile of Vikky Alexander

University of Victoria Professor Profile
* http://huffingtonpost.com /annabel-osberg/the-collages-of-vikky-alexander_b_5907910.html * http://museumofnonvisibleart.com/interviews/vikky-alexander/ {{DEFAULTSORT:Alexander, Vikky 1959 births Living people Canadian contemporary artists Canadian installation artists Artists from Vancouver Artists from Victoria, British Columbia NSCAD University alumni Canadian women artists Canadian collage artists Women collage artists Women installation artists Members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts