Vikky Alexander
Encyclopedia
Vikky Alexander is a Canadian contemporary artist based in Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...

, British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...

. She has exhibited internationally since 1981. Working across mediums she is a leading practitioner in the field of photo-conceptualism
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...

 and is well-known as an installation
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...

 artist who uses photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

, drawing
Drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...

, and collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....

. She is one of Canada's most acclaimed contemporary artists and has been recognized in Japan, Korea, Europe, New Zealand and the United States. Her work includes mirrors, photographic landscape murals, postcards collected on her travels, and her own photography and video.

Background

Vikky Alexander was born in Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia
Victoria is the capital city of British Columbia, Canada and is located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific coast. The city has a population of about 78,000 within the metropolitan area of Greater Victoria, which has a population of 360,063, the 15th most populous Canadian...

, Canada and is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She is known for her large scale photo-mural installations and multimedia works 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. Her early work informed the movement of Appropriation art in the early 1980s for which she is historically recognized as the youngest innovator of the tendency alongside Richard Prince
Richard Prince
Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer. Prince began appropriating photographs in 1975...

, Louise Lawler
Louise Lawler
Louise Lawler is a U.S. artist and photographer. From the late 1970s onwards, Lawler's work has focused on the presentation and marketing of artwork. Much of this work consists of photographs of other peoples' artwork and the context in which it is viewed...

, Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed...

 and Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine is an American photographer and appropriation artist.-Education:Levine received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1969. In 1973, she earned an M.F.A. from the same institution....

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

She has exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions including CEPA
CEPA
CEPA may refer to:* Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement between India and Republic of Korea. Enforced on 1 January, 2010.* Canadian Environmental Protection Act* Center for Economic Policy Analysis at New School University, New York City...

 Buffalo 1983, New Museum, New York City 1985, Kunsthalle Bern
Kunsthalle Bern
The Kunsthalle Bern is a Kunsthalle on the Helvetiaplatz in Berne, 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 expositions of contemporary art...

, Bern 1990, Vancouver Art Gallery
Vancouver Art Gallery
The Vancouver Art Gallery is the fifth-largest art gallery in Canada and the largest in Western Canada. It is located at 750 Hornby Street in Vancouver, British Columbia...

, Vancouver 1992, Mercer Union
Mercer Union
Mercer Union is an artist-run centre in Toronto, Ontario, established in 1979 to exhibit contemporary art.In 2009, the gallery moved to the Bloor and Lansdowne area in Toronto's west end. Previously the gallery had held homes at 29 Mercer Street , 439 King Street West, 333 Adelaide St...

, Toronto 1993, Presentation House Gallery
Presentation House Gallery
Presentation House Gallery is an art gallery in North Vancouver. It is the largest non-profit photographic gallery in Western Canada and has operated since 1981...

, Vancouver 1996, Art Gallery of Windsor
Art Gallery of Windsor
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, regional, and national artists...

, Windsor 1998, Contemporary Art Gallery
Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver)
The Contemporary Art Gallery is the only independent, non-profit public art gallery in downtown Vancouver. The CAG exhibits local, national, and international artists, primarily featuring emerging local artists producing Canadian contemporary art...

, Vancouver 1999, Catriona Jeffries Gallery
Catriona Jeffries Gallery
Catriona Jeffries Gallery is an art gallery in Vancouver 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 and particular international artists....

, Vancouver, National Gallery of Canada
National Gallery of Canada
The National Gallery of Canada , located in the capital city Ottawa, Ontario, is one of Canada's premier art galleries.The Gallery is now housed in a glass and granite building on Sussex Drive with a notable view of the Canadian Parliament buildings on Parliament Hill. The acclaimed structure was...

, Ottawa 2000, State Gallery, Vancouver 2004, Trepanier Baer Gallery, Calgary 2009, Massey University
Massey University
Massey University is one of New Zealand's largest universities with approximately 36,000 students, 20,000 of whom are extramural students.The University has campuses in Palmerston North , Wellington and Auckland . Massey offers most of its degrees extramurally within New Zealand and internationally...

, Wellington 2010. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions: Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...

, New York, Dia Art Foundation
Dia Art Foundation
Dia Art Foundation is a non-profit organization that initiates, supports, presents, and preserves art projects. It was established in 1974 as the Lone Star Foundation by Philippa de Menil, the daughter of Houston arts patron Dominique de Menil and an heiress to the Schlumberger oil exploration...

, New York, Yokohama Civic Art Gallery, Yokohama, Barbican Art Gallery, London, Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Taipei Fine Arts Museum
The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is a museum in Taipei, Taiwan. The museum first opened on December 24, 1983 at the former site of the United States Taiwan Defense Command . It was the first purpose built museum in Taiwan to host modern and contemporary art exhibitions...

, Taipei, Seattle Art Museum
Seattle Art Museum
The Seattle Art Museum is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington, USA. It maintains three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill, and the Olympic Sculpture Park on the central Seattle waterfront, which opened on...

, Seattle.

She was also included in the comprehensive exhibition Interdidal of Vancouver School
Vancouver School
The Vancouver School of conceptual or post-conceptual photography is a loose term applied to a grouping of artists from Vancouver starting in the 1980s...

 artists held at MuHKA in Antwerp in 2004. The significance of this exhibition drew attention to her influence over two prominent movements in contemporary art production, one in New York and the other in Vancouver. An earlier body of work anticipated Appropriation art while her later artworks deepened the language of Photo-conceptualism, which became the larger tendency of the Vancouver School internationally. Collections of her work can be found in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, International Center of Photography
International Center of Photography
The International Center of Photography is a photography museum, school, and research center in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States...

, New York City, National Gallery of Canada
National Gallery of Canada
The National Gallery of Canada , located in the capital city Ottawa, Ontario, is one of Canada's premier art galleries.The Gallery is now housed in a glass and granite building on Sussex Drive with a notable view of the Canadian Parliament buildings on Parliament Hill. The acclaimed structure was...

, Ottawa and the Deste Foundation
Deste Foundation
Deste Foundation or Deste Foundation, Centre for Contemporary Art is an arts foundation in Athens, Greece. Housing the massive collection of Greek businessman Dakis Joannou, it organizes exhibitions by emerging and established international contemporary artists...

, Athens. Vikky Alexander is represented by Trepanier Baer Gallery in Calgary.

Press

The pioneering Vancouver School
Vancouver School
The Vancouver School of conceptual or post-conceptual photography is a loose term applied to a grouping of artists from Vancouver starting in the 1980s...

 artist and writer Ian Wallace
Ian Wallace (artist)
Ian Wallace in Shoreham, England, is a Canadian artist based in Vancouver. He won the 2004 Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts...

 relates how her work is "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
Dan Graham
Dan Graham , is a conceptual artist now working out of New York City. He is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner of conceptual art and an art critic and theorist. His art career began in 1964 when he moved to New York and opened the John Daniels Gallery....

 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, such artists as Louise Lawler
Louise Lawler
Louise Lawler is a U.S. artist and photographer. From the late 1970s onwards, Lawler's work has focused on the presentation and marketing of artwork. Much of this work consists of photographs of other peoples' artwork and the context in which it is viewed...

, Kim Gordon
Kim Gordon
Kim Althea Gordon is an American musician, vocalist, artist, record producer, video director and actress. She has sung and played bass and guitar in the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, and in Free Kitten with Julia Cafritz...

, Michael Asher
Michael Asher
Michael Max Asher is a conceptual artist, described by The New York Times as "among the patron saints of the Conceptual Art phylum known as Institutional Critique, an often esoteric dissection of the assumptions that govern how we perceive art." Rather than designing new art objects, Asher...

 and Vikky Alexander 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
Dan Cameron is an American art curator based in New York City and New Orleans.Cameron's early years were spent in Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky and in Hudson Falls, NY. He attended Hudson Falls Public Schools , Syracuse University and Bennington College , where he earned a BA in 1979...

 is quoted reviewing a large scale installation work titled Lake of 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.”

Publications

  • Alexander, Vikky, and Ian Wallace. Vikky Alexander: Vaux-Le-Vicomte Panorama. Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery
    Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver)
    The Contemporary Art Gallery is the only independent, non-profit public art gallery in downtown Vancouver. The CAG exhibits local, national, and international artists, primarily featuring emerging local artists producing Canadian contemporary art...

    , 1999.
  • Alexander, Vikky. Vikky Alexander: Lake in the Woods. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery
    Vancouver Art Gallery
    The Vancouver Art Gallery is the fifth-largest art gallery in Canada and the largest in Western Canada. It is located at 750 Hornby Street in Vancouver, British Columbia...

    , 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
    Walter Phillips Gallery
    Walter Phillips Gallery was established in 1976 in Banff, Alberta, as a part of the Banff Centre in Banff National Park. Walter J. Phillips was a printmaker and painter, from the 1930s to the 1950s, who played a seminal role in the development of the visual arts program in The Banff School of...

    , 1987.
  • Cameron, Dan
    Dan Cameron
    Dan Cameron is an American art curator based in New York City and New Orleans.Cameron's early years were spent in Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky and in Hudson Falls, NY. He attended Hudson Falls Public Schools , Syracuse University and Bennington College , where he earned a BA in 1979...

    . "Post Feminism". Flash Art. 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
    Winnipeg Art Gallery
    The Winnipeg Art Gallery is a public art gallery that was founded in 1912. It is Western Canada's oldest civic gallery and the 6th largest in the country...

    , 1990.
  • Ferguson, Bruce W. Vikky Alexander: Glass Sculpture. Bern: Kunsthalle Bern
    Kunsthalle Bern
    The Kunsthalle Bern is a Kunsthalle on the Helvetiaplatz in Berne, 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 expositions of contemporary art...

    , 1990.
  • Graham, Dan
    Dan Graham
    Dan Graham , is a conceptual artist now working out of New York City. He is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner of conceptual art and an art critic and theorist. His art career began in 1964 when he moved to New York and opened the John Daniels Gallery....

    . "Signs." Artforum
    Artforum
    Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...

    . April 1981
  • Hagen, Charles. "Commodity Image." New York Times. 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
    University of Minnesota Press
    The University of Minnesota Press is a university press that is part of the University of Minnesota.Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is best known for its books in social and cultural thought, critical theory, race and ethnic studies, urbanism, feminist criticism, and media...

    , 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
    Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
    The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the campus of the University of British Columbia....

    , 2005.

External links

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