Vikky Alexander (CRF 2022) will have an opening reception for her exhibition Les Jardins De Versailles at Wilding Cran Gallery on Saturday, November 12th from 4-6PM. The show will be available until December 22nd.
“Since the 1980s, Vikky Alexander has utilized sculpture, collage, photography, and video to explore utopian illusions at the nexus of desire, capitalism, and commodification in modern culture. While her earlier work focuses on the idealization of glamor in contemporary advertising and consumer culture, Les Jardins De Versailles sets out to penetrate the fantasy of constructed environments. Expanding upon her fascinations with appropriated imagery, Alexander draws on 18th century architectural engravings of Versailles as the template for her conceptual collages.
Throughout her body of work, Vikky Alexander explores methods of landscaping the sublime in order to expose the seams that bind our visions of utopia. The exhibition of Les Jardins De Versailles pieces together a puzzle of composite desires, revealing the relationship between banality and luxury, void and folly. Leading us through simulated views of the Baths of Apollo, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Grove of Domes, Alexander brings the viewer into a metaphysical space charged with layers of artifice to confront the playful, albeit sinister performance of paradise.
Vikky Alexander is a Montreal-based artist celebrated for her ongoing contributions to Pictures Generation strategies of critique by appropriation. Engendering a quietly reflective feminism that investigates the power of framing devices within the architectures of corporate branding, her works assess the fetishistic, bureaucratized and aspirational—generating recombinatory mixtures of appropriated scenes of natural landscapes and typifications of beauty that demarcate the romanticization of nature and the naturalization of romance. Activating a jarring fracture between embodied experience and its idealized presentation, her sensual and stylized works spanning installation, sculpture, photography, and video cumulatively denature the commercial annexation of personal capacities for self-reflection.”
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