Vikky Alexander (b.1959, Victoria, British Columbia)

Alexander is recognized for her insightful commentary on the allure of consumer culture. In Between Dreaming & Living #5, Vikky Alexander (b.1959) creates an ethereal atmosphere by sandwiching photographs of a fashion model between images of landscapes and overlaying them with a rich blue Plexiglas. She developed this innovative method during her early explorations of the glossy glamour of commodity culture. Known for a practice that was connected to both New York appropriation art and Vancouver photo-conceptualism, Alexander re-photographed advertisements from fashion magazines in the 1980s, cropping and enlarging her source material to consider how female beauty and sexuality are used to sell products. But her montages are less a rejection of consumerism than they are an exploration of advertising strategies.

Born in Victoria, Alexander studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and by the mid-1980s had begun exhibiting in New York. In her early work, responding to simulations of nature found in advertising, interior decoration, theme parks, and elsewhere, she examined the attraction to and alienation from nature in consumer society. In Yosemite, 1982, she considered the theme of artificial nature by juxtaposing an image of a fashion model wearing a fur-trimmed leather coat with a majestic view of the famous national park in California, sourced from a calendar. Drawing on the tripartite structure often seen in Renaissance altarpieces, the work interrupts the sublime beauty of landscape imagery to show how luxury goods, beauty, and nature are transformed into commodities to inspire our devotion.

Alexander’s seminal work Lake in the Woods, 1986, is a corridor installation combining a photographic mural, mirror, and manufactured wood product to investigate how nature is summoned in architectural interiors. As viewers walk along the corridor, they see a wallpaper mural on one side and, on the other, wood laminate as well as reflections in the mirror. In recent years, Alexander has continued to explore the tension between nature and culture in her work, along with the lifestyle fantasies of consumerism and intersections between beauty and artifice. She is professor emeritus at the University of Victoria.