Vikky Alexander

Two non-musical refrains played in my head as I walked—for the third time—through Vikky Alexander’s retrospective exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. One was “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” The other was “All that glitters is not gold.” Recounting this is not to reduce Alexander’s smartly conceived and flawlessly executed work to fairy tales and aphorisms but to consider how culturally and psychologically resonant is her deployment of the shiny, glossy, glittery and mirror-like. Human beings have been trying to sort out their effects for centuries.

Throughout Alexander’s show, reflecting surfaces function in seductive but also thought-provoking ways. Sometimes they distance us from or fracture our perception of the (seemingly) primary image, whether that is a panoramic view of an 18th-century French garden or a window display of high-gloss, 21st-century kitsch. At other times, they reflect us back at ourselves as viewers, contrasting our drab everydayness with the idealized faces and figures that Alexander presents us with. As we see ourselves we are reminded, in a moment of both physical and psychological reflection, that we are looking at a work of art—a cultural construct probing another cultural construct. Photographic images are presented in ways that effectively undermine them. Desire is projected, intercepted and bounced back at us.

One of Alexander’s preoccupations is with how advertising and retail display generate consumption. Other themes, identified in the show’s catalogue by its curator, Daina Augaitis, include “the appropriation of vernacular imagery and materials to consider how meaning is accrued and deployed; the representation of architecture as a space containing utopian aspirations; and an abiding interest in nature, how it is represented and how we engage with and are estranged from it.” Augaitis quotes Alexander as saying, “My job as an artist is to figure out how things work.”

Subtitled “Extreme Beauty,” the exhibition surveys work Alexander created in New York (where she lived from 1979 to 1992), Vancouver (1993 to 2016) and Montreal (where she has been based for the past three years). It ranges in scale and execution from towering installations to wall-sized projections to modestly scaled prints and light boxes. Her images, both appropriated and original, depict fashion models, theme parks, shopping malls, classical gardens, clothing- store windows and furniture showrooms. Locations alluded to include Las Vegas, Disneyland, London, Paris, Tokyo and Istanbul. Again, desire leaves its traces throughout.

The show is installed chronologically and pitches us immediately into the figurative images the artist reproduced and repurposed from fashion and other magazines in the early 1980s. Obsession, 1983, features 11 photos of then model-du-jour Christie Brinkley, printed in black and white, enlarged to the point of graininess, numbered, mounted under yellow Plexi and installed in a grid. The effect is to underline the images’ mass media origins and the model’s seemingly endless reproducibility. The work speaks to the many uses—sporty, sexy, casual, glamorous—that were made of Brinkley’s blonde hair, high cheekbones and slender build, just as it spotlights how effectively consumerism can be painted on the canvas of women’s faces and bodies. In her essay, Augaitis cites art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau on the ways Alexander and other artists of the time “unmasked” such advertising and mass media images by “revealing their codes.” (It is amazing how, despite the knowledge we’ve gleaned, advertising still so effectively objectifies women and conflates the sexual with the material.)

In the mid- to late 1980s, Alexander shifted away from the figure towards the landscape through images both juxtaposed and sandwiched together. The figure is dropped altogether in works of ersatz nature, including hard-edge “paintings” created out of woodgrain- patterned contact paper, and an impenetrable, six-sided pavilion, its dark wooden panels interspersed with slices of a photographic mural depicting an idealized natural scene—sunlight slanting through foliage and over a gentle stream. The most memorable work of this period is Lake in the Woods, 1986. Installed on either side of a wide corridor, it consists of a photo mural of a forest-bounded northern lake on one wall and, on the facing wall, fake wood panelling surmounted by a horizontal row of square mirrors. While evoking a kitschy recreation-room aesthetic, the work speaks to the ways in which culture constructs an idea of landscape. It also examines our mediated relationship with the natural world, our compromised attempts at modernist architecture’s aim to bring the outdoors in and, at the same time, our impulse to frame and control nature. (One of the allusions in this work is to the 18th-century “Claude glass.”) Alexander creates obstacles to the viewer’s experience of anything resembling the sublime.

After all the brilliant hues and shiny surfaces of Alexander’s colour photos and photo collages—again, expensive clothing in store windows in Tokyo’s Ginza district, reflecting and confounding planes in the West Edmonton Mall, topiary and manicured gardens at Disneyland, panoramic shots of Vaux-le-Vicomte fractured by mirrored pillars, make-believe modernist interiors—it is disconcerting to walk into a gallery filled with black and white images that evoke, consciously or not, the ruinous, even the deathly. The “Island” series, 2011, shot in London’s Kew Gardens in 2010, depicts tropical plants in a greenhouse, grown so thick, tall and robust that they seem to be overtaking the architecture—overwhelming the wrought iron supports and threatening to burst through the glass roof. The symbolism here is of a rebellion against a colonial power: “exotic” plants brought back to England in the 19th century from the far reaches of empire, bursting out of their showcase, defying their colonizers, their captors, their collectors in this, the 21st century. The metaphor is succinct and effective.

The second series of black and white photographs, “Idyll,” 2019, explores the unrealized utopian ideals behind a private retreat whose builders have attempted to integrate it into the natural environment of an unnamed Caribbean island. Instead of enticing Club Med-style images of a glorious island getaway, we are given shots of somehow sorry-looking stone walls, pathways and portals along with the rooftops of unattractive structures built into a cliff. Rather than appearing unobtrusively nestled within nature, the place looks failed and abandoned, which it is not (although Alexander’s photos are unpopulated). The effect of ruins, the suggested end of some notion of civilization in both the “Island” and “Idyll” series, is served by the grim, grey tones of the photographs. Alexander has said she chose black and white because she didn’t want the extravagantly clichéd blues of the Caribbean or the intense tropical greens of the plants at Kew Gardens to distract her viewers from what she sees as significant in these works. Still, her choice has taken her art into another territory entirely—the antithesis of all that consumerist gloss, glitz and glamour in her earlier works. In a future-fiction kind of way, it is possible to imagine capitalism’s apocalyptic end. ❚

“Vikky Alexander: Extreme Beauty” is at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, from July 6, 2019, to January 26, 2020.

Robin Laurence is a Vancouver-based writer, curator and contributing editor to Border Crossings.

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