Between Dreaming & Living

Rotating installation

Between Dreaming & Living #1, 1985
On view from March 18 — July 25, 2021

Between Dreaming & Living #3, 1985
On view from July 26 — November 17, 2021

Between Dreaming & Living #9, 1985
On view from November 18, 2021 — March 15, 2022

Since the 1980s, Vikky Alexander’s practice, which includes photography, sculpture, installation, and collage, has examined cultures of desire and utopian ideals. Early in her career, Alexander initiated what turned out to be a long-term interest in the use of appropriated imagery from magazines and other popular media sources, which she uses to critique consumer culture. On view successively from April 2021 to March 2022 are three works from her series Between Dreaming & Living, which was created in 1985 and first exhibited at the Coburg Gallery in Vancouver. The original images are 35 mm colour slides that have been sandwiched together, printed in black and white, and framed with a Plexiglas overlay, the tint of which produces the colours seen in the final images.

In these works, Alexander fuses found fashion photography with sublime landscapes to create a contrast between the urban and the rural as well as the natural and the unnatural. The vibrancy of the colours, the intensity of the figures’ expressions, and the eerie transparency created by layering disparate images creates a haunting quality that complicates the aura of romance and glamour inherent in the source material. Exhibiting the works on a billboard — traditionally a space dedicated to advertising — adds additional significance to the way in which the images sell ideals of different kinds: romantic love and utopian nature.

The GreyChurch Billboard is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill