Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Vikky Alexander’s Vertical Dreams, an immersive installation featuring four large-scale wall murals based on the artist’s most recent paper collages. Best known for work that foregrounds a strong interest in the histories of architecture, design, and fashion, Alexander often focuses on locations such as shopping malls, showrooms, and leisure parks - sites of consumerism, desire, and utopian fantasy. Her images are often complicated through light, reflections, and refractions.
They speak to a set of conditions and values embedded in appearances seen through furnishings and the notional view from the window. The constructed scenes in Vertical Dreams juxtapose images of landscape and textured wood-grain with pattern and color, transforming the gallery into a series of portals to seemingly utopian spaces. Through these imaginative and poetic images, Alexander invites viewers to examine the unease beneath the veneer of modern life.
Vikky Alexander is a leading practitioner in the field of photo-conceptualism. She works with photography, collage, installation and sculpture. As a contemporary of artists such as Richard Prince, James Welling and Sherrie Levine who, along with Alexander, were active in New York in the early 1980’s, she is often associated with the Pictures Generation. Her work is held in private and public collections around the world including the Deste Foundation Athens, Greece; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); International Centre of Photography, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.