Vikky Alexander

Vikky Alexander (born January 30, 1959) is a Canadian contemporary artist who now lives in Montreal.

Work Alexander 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 in the early 1980s for which she is historically recognized as the youngest innovator of the tendency alongside Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine.

Alexander has continued to explore the tensions between nature and culture in her recent work. Recent projects have considered the lifestyle fantasies facilitated by consumerism, as well as the intersections of beauty and artifice. and in 2021, her work was included with Edward Burtynsky, Jane Buyers and others in Making Space at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax. In 2024, a solo show of her work titled Vikky Alexander, Dream Palace, was exhibited at the Galerie Allen in Paris, France.

She was also included in the comprehensive exhibition Intertidal of Vancouver School artists held at MuHKA in Antwerp 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.

Selected public collections Institutional collections of her work can be found in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the International Center of Photography in New York City, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and at the Deste Foundation, Athens. Alexander is represented by Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary, Wilding Cran, Los Angeles, Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Downs & Ross, New York.

Conceptual artist and critic Dan Graham 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, Kim Gordon, 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 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.