Vikky Alexander

Vikky Alexander RCA (born January 30, 1959) is a Canadian contemporary artist who now lives in Montreal. She is a member of the Vancouver School and was a Professor of photography in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Victoria in Canada. She has retired from teaching and now holds the title professor emerita.

She has exhibited internationally since 1981 as a practitioner in the field of photo-conceptualism, and as an installation artist who uses photography, drawing, and collage. Her themes include the appropriated image, and the deceptions of nature and space. Her artworks include mirrors, photographic landscape murals, postcards, video and photography. She is part of the Pictures Generation.

Alexander was born in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada and is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design from which she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1979.

Alexander is known for her large scale photo-mural installations and multimedia art that combine photography with sculptural objects. These works foreground a strong interest in the history of architecture, the fields of design and fashion supported by the production of drawing and collage. Alexander's use of modernist architecture and industrial design have explored issues of artifice and representation. Her early work informed the movement of Appropriation art in the early 1980s for which she is historically recognized as the youngest innovator of the tendency alongside Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine.

Alexander has continued to explore the tensions between nature and culture in her recent work. Recent projects have considered the lifestyle fantasies facilitated by consumerism, as well as the intersections of beauty and artifice.

Alexander has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo exhibitions including "CEPA", Buffalo 1983, New Museum, New York City 1985, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern 1990, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver 1992 and 2019, Ansel Adams Center, San Francisco 1992, Mercer Union, Toronto 1993, Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver 1996, Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor 1998, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver 1999, Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 2000, State Gallery, Vancouver 2004, Trepanier Baer Gallery, Calgary 2009, Massey University, Wellington 2010. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Dia Art Foundation, New York, Yokohama Civic Art Gallery, Yokohama, Barbican Art Gallery, London, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle and in 2021, her work was included with Edward Burtynsky, Jane Buyers and others in Making Space at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax. In 2024, a solo show of her work titled Vikky Alexander, Dream Palace, was exhibited at the Galerie Allen in Paris, France.

She was also included in the comprehensive exhibition Intertidal of Vancouver School artists held at MuHKA in Antwerp in 2004. This exhibition was influential in two prominent art movements, one in New York, N.Y. (USA) and the other in Vancouver, B.C. (CAN); an earlier body of her work emerged from Appropriation Art while her later artworks deepened the language of Photo-conceptualism, which was part of a photography group known internationally as the Vancouver School.

Institutional collections of her work can be found in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the International Center of Photography in New York City, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and at the Deste Foundation, Athens. Alexander is represented by Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary, Wilding Cran, Los Angeles, Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Downs & Ross, New York.