Vikky Alexander

Vikky Alexander (b. 1959, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada) has worked in photography, sculpture, and installation since the 1980s. Her work is characterized by an ongoing consideration of illusion and desire within design and architecture. Through the appropriation of images of people and landscapes, Alexander recognizes the artificial as a space of utopian fantasy that is built into design and photographic advertisements. Her work extracts and inverts these forms and creates images and installations that explore the relationship between desire, capitalism, and commodification. Alexander’s work is associated with both the 1980s Appropriation Art movement, the Vancouver School of conceptual photography, and the Pictures Generation.

Alexander received her BFA the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1979. Having exhibited professionally since 1981, Alexander has shown in venues such as The New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, DIA Art Foundation, New York; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, USA; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland; Vancouver Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK; Yokohama Civic Art Gallery, Yokohama, Japan; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Tiawan; amongst others. Her works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; International Center for Photography, New York; The New School, New York; and the Deste Foundation, Athens. Since 1992 Alexander has been professor of photography in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Victoria in Canada. Alexander currently lives and works between Vancouver and Montreal, Canada.