Vikky Alexander

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present a new installation by Vancouver artist Vikky Alexander. Alexander is a senior Canadian artist who has exhibited widely across Canada, the USA and Europe, and who is represented in many of Canada's most important museum collections. She is currently a professor of visual art at the University of Victoria.

Vikky Alexander is recognized for her use of a minimalist and architectonic aesthetic to explore social constructions of nature and notions of utopian spaces. In the installation presented at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Alexander employs a digital slide dissolve unit to project a series of six wall-sized panoramic images of the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte in France. Designed in the 17th century by André Le Nôtre, these gardens were devised to create a flamboyant artificial world filled with optical and perceptual tricks. In Alexander's installation, the images of these gardens are reflected onto eight large mirrored columns that are strategically placed in the gallery. The combination of images and mirrors unsettles how space is experienced, and echo the disorienting viewpoints in Le Nôtre's gardens while playing with the photograph's inability to thoroughly describe space and perspective.