"My job as an artist is to figure out how things work."
Downtown—(July 3, 2019) The Vancouver Art Gallery's latest curated exhibition Extreme Beauty is renowned photo-based conceptual artist Vikky Alexander's first retrospective following her prolific forty-year career trajectory. It features more than eighty of her works recontextualizing the appropriation of imagery and mechanisms of display that shape meaning, beauty, artifice, and desire.
Entertainment (chromogenic prints, vinyl type), 1983
From her time as an art student in Halifax during the 1970s to starting out her career in 1980s New York, her lengthy stay in Vancouver in the 1990s and 2000s, and work now in Montreal, Alexander's collection tell stories of photographic interrogations surrounding major themes of the artificiality of nature and seduction of space.
Carefully curated by interim director Daina Augaitis, VAG was committed to engaging Alexander's decades-spanning work through its initial spirit of experimentation with "photographic readymades" enlarged and juxtaposed to conveys feelings of obsession.
Ginza Series: Flowers and Earrings (inkjet prints), 2018
There are many pieces from Alexander's extended time in Vancouver (1992 to 2016) where her work found parallels amongst our community of conceptually-driven artists.
Grace (record covers, vinyl tape), 1984
Inside the gallery's second-floor display, you can see the formal tropes of our city's architecture and interior design from over the years.
Model Suite: Sliding Door (transmounted chromogenic print), 2005
Through her long-standing investigation of utopian architectural spaces and abiding interest in nature, Alexander's contemporary artistic ideas have evolved with our escalating commodification of mass consumer culture as she captured new ways of shaping how her work was deployed or displayed to entice certain meanings.
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