Vikky Alexander

The dream-like spaces in Vikky Alexander’s “Other Fantasies” are comprised of shop windows filled with luxury goods, modernist interiors, grand 18th- and 19th-century parks adorned by architectural follies and wild animals, artificial wood-panel walls pierced by windows onto the landscape and a new image type that the Montreal-based artist presented as large hallucinogenic murals. These fantasy architectures, which seem to be positioned high up in the sky, suggested the tunnelled structure of a jetway or a skywalk above a scenic lookout, or the ultimate fantasy spa getaway.

Produced this year, the vivid murals—Dot Wall, Green Leaf Ceiling and Silver Floor—introduce a direct address to an embodied viewer that Alexander has not made before, in this way. Two earlier installation works, Lake of the Woods, 1986, and Autumn/Spring, 1997, are brought to mind, but neither invites the viewer into the space of the work. Though similar in scale, however, they keep the viewer on the outside in the latter, and in the former place her in a passageway. The new murals draw the viewer into their floor-to-ceiling expanses via compositional entryways that rhyme with the gallery floor, and portal-like openings that give onto distant vistas that hint at the sublime. These images beckon to the viewer as if you could walk into them. They are seductive invitations that spark a desire to enter and, more, to seek out the possibility of transcendence in what lies beyond.

Alexander scaled the images in direct relationship to the human body in two other murals on view, which depict open windows in fake wood-panel walls looking out onto a forest in one and fields of flowers in the other. As in all of the new murals, the images are collages of patterned papers and photos, with the internal scale of the patterns out of whack. To project the hallucinatory effects of dreams, the fake wood grains, the origami-paper curtains, the leaf patterns on walls are all greatly magnified. An engaged viewer might suddenly feel as if she had ingested the Wonderland cookie tagged “Eat Me” and shrunk.

The large images of the murals were constructed first as small paper collages. These were scanned, enlarged and printed on adhesive-backed vinyl film. The vinyl material has the thinnest of surfaces, which, coupled with the mural placement in relation to the gallery architecture, opened up the space of the rooms. If you felt invited in by the outside scale of the murals, the internal scale complicated matters. In the images of Dot Wall, Green Leaf Ceiling and Silver Floor, scale works in two ways. The outsize internal scale of the structure-establishing patterns enhances feelings of imbalance and unease that are brought about by the upward-tilted floor planes and the precipitous edges of the open portals. Even more hallucinatory, Silver Floor, in which the “walls” are a splintered fusion of inside and outside images (leaves, wood grain), has a floor that appears either to be transparent or to have dropped away altogether. Patterns are the building blocks of structure in the mural images, but pattern also is all about surface. Where there should be something solid to stand on, in Silver Floor there lies instead a pattern of ethereal blue and white streaks that could signify sky or clouds or the wild blue yonder beyond.

The open portals suggest the possibility of transcendence, but the sharp precipitous edges warn that these enticing spaces might in fact be dangerous territory to venture into. In close-up view, their images disintegrate into the dot patterns of the reproduction system that produced them. They are shown to be what they are: digitally produced mirages that manifest the dreams and desires of an insatiable consumer culture. As metaphors, they are related to Alexander’s new series of five photographs of shop windows in Tokyo’s Ginza shopping district. This area, which purveys expensive Western luxury goods, is known for its alluring window displays. In her photographs, Alexander shatters their panes into layers of reflections and image fragments that confuse inside and outside spaces and merge the store interiors with the street and the passers-by.

Images that Alexander printed on canvas in 2016–17 from small paper and photo collages she’d made a decade earlier are technical and imagistic forerunners of the new murals. In these works, such as Rising River, 2016–17, shown in the exhibition, she depicts fancifully modernist domestic interiors, whose status as self-identifying refuge is threatened by looming or raging nature seen directly outside the large windows. Also on view were inkjet prints from 2013 in which Alexander explores the intersections of nature, culture and spectacle in consumer societies. In prints such as Cheetah and Pavillion at Sans Souci, she has collaged images from postcards and toy catalogues that juxtapose great European gardens with their architectural follies and “wild” animals that have been dropped into the scenes. Her chosen image sources are promotional photographs. With them, she points to culture and nature and the histories of empires as spectacular commodities that are part and parcel of the dream of capitalist societies.

The exceptional new murals and new Ginza photographs seen in concert with earlier works in “Other Fantasies” offered a welcome opportunity to consider the coherence and the complexity of themes in Alexander’s work of the past decade. A full retrospective of her work, curated by Chief Curator Emerita Daina Augaitis, will be presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2019— an event to look forward to. ❚

“Other Fantasies” was exhibited at TrépanierBaer, Calgary, from April 6 to May 5, 2018.

Nancy Tousley, recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2011, is an art critic, writer and independent curator based in Calgary.