Vikky Alexander was interviewed by Leah Sandals on Canadian Art .
Vikky Alexander’s Enduring Lifestyle FantasiesWhy the artist’s 1980s reshoots of fashion-magazine editorials have found a new audience in Canada and internationally.
There are a lot of things one can talk about with Montreal-based artist Vikky Alexander. One of these things is just how much she has going on right now and in recent months.
You studied at NSCAD in the 1970s. What did you study there, and how did it lead you (or not) towards the image-appropriation practices you became known for?
I studied there between 1976 and 1979. And I took, like everybody, a variety of studio courses. But I have to say one of my favourites was darkroom photography. I just loved the medium; it was like magic.Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman , and Rosler’s photo collage works like Bringing the War Home . These were all seminal pieces for me at that time, and I still go back to them.Viewing Space . Halifax was a small town at that point, and a bank decided to put in a glass tower, which seemed humungous at the time. Before it was completely rented, I did a piece on the 18th floor of that tower.Viewing Space , on each concrete column I put a 16-by-20 black and white print I took from ABC captioned news for the hearing impaired—in these images, you don’t who they represent or where they are from, and there is this enigmatic text on the bottom of them.
That’s so interesting. Your current UK show also features this broad panorama of a kind of landscape, opposite a series of quite smaller, almost diorama- or TV-like scenes, too. I want to talk about that more a moment, but for now I want to keep following the chronology: When did you first start investigating and photographing images in fashion magazines? Why did these images compel you and why did you want to work with them?
I moved to New York in 1979 directly from Halifax.
How did you shoot the magazine spreads, in a logistical sense?
It was a fairly simple process to set up. I just had a 35 mm camera with some cheap close-up lenses, a cable release, and a second-hand copy stand. So it didn’t take up much space. And then all you needed were the magazines.Vogue and French Vogue were quite expensive.
What drew you to those particular magazines beyond the image quality? Did you enjoy reading them growing up?
I think as a young woman, I was always fascinated by the staging of these editorial fashion spreads. And then, by isolating the models, by using extreme cropping and eliminating the text that is around them, and using things like repetition and juxtaposition, you could highlight the dramatic sensuality of these images.
How did you print the photos? Did you have a darkroom? Or another process?
I would just save up and get them printed at a lab. I didn’t make that many pieces in those days. And they were big pieces for the early 80s. I maybe made two or three pieces a year—and if they were an edition, I certainly didn’t print out the edition.Obsession that Cooper Cole put in his Miami booth last year—10 black and white photos of Christie Brinkley with a yellow plexi overlay. Those I printed in my loft in New York. I enlarged them on the wall and then I developed them on plastic sheets on the floor. It was crazy. Simon [Cole] has digital versions of the same images, but as for the original ones, that’s how I made them.
You are identified by some critics as being of the Pictures Generation, and by others as being connected to the Vancouver School of photoconceptualism. How useful are these categories, do you think? How do you respond to them in your own mind?
Well, I did live in New York from 1979 to 1992, so it was a pretty large part of my life. But until recently, that whole part was overlooked in Canada—and I almost kind of forgot about it myself, because your work just keeps going.Obsession —the Christie Brinkley piece. At that point, I had already met Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace and Rodney Graham through Dan Graham, and we would socialize when they were in New York or I was in Vancouver.
Your first UK solo show is on now, and juxtaposes a black-and-white greenhouse panorama on one wall with smaller colour images of animals in luxury settings on other walls. Why did you want to focus on that work for this first UK solo show?
I’ll start with the colour pieces. I have a collection of postcards I pick up when I travel, and I was thinking, “How can I use them? I can’t stand to send them, they’re too nice.” And I came up with the idea of putting animals in these stately homes.Day of the Triffids .
It’s funny, putting those Kew Garden images in the Eaton Centre would almost seem to be in conversation with Michael Snow’s Canada Geese in the centre’s south entrance. But you also have large wall pieces in your current show at Trépanier Baer in Calgary. Can you tell me more about those?
I did a public project for the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver last year, on the glass-fronted Yaletown-Roundhouse Skytrain Station. It used a photograph from my series Model Suite —a 2005 project focusing on views of Vancouver as pictured in the fake windows of condominium model suites.Model Suite —I did a wall-scale photo of model bedroom inside L’Escalier. L’Escalier is an exhibition space in the home of a writer; I thought, “Oh, this is a domestic space. And I will put this salesroom domestic space within his actual domestic space.”
It’s so interesting to hear all this. The fashion work from the 80s could be read, by some, as a study of heavily constructed lifestyle fantasies—and likewise, these model-suite and collaged-interior and shop-window spaces also speak to a kind of constructed, commercially endorsed fantasy. It seems like a pattern in your work is always taking a closer look at that.
The larger pieces in Calgary and London are sometimes about nature and culture, the picture window, the natural coming inside and messing up architecture. And the photographs are a little more display-oriented—when I look at these shop-window images now, I see where they came from, and they definitely came from the 80s. I’m just appropriating in a different way, kind of.Model Suite was built on the ground floor—but all the views were fake and backlit. Even if you were really on the 30th floor, all the views the suite windows showed of Vancouver didn’t match up—they were completely disjointed.
What do you think in regards to the resurgence of interest in your early work at contemporary art fairs like NADA Miami, the Armory Show and beyond?
It’s interesting for me to start to relook at older pieces. The Tokyo showroom images— well now, I completely see them relating to the work from the 80s. But that’s not what I thought when I was taking those images. So that part is interesting: in self-reflection, thinking, “Wow, not that much has changed.”
– Leah Sandals
To see the full post please visit Canadian Art .
For more information about Vikky Alexander please contact the gallery:
info@coopercolegallery.com +1.416.531.8000
