[Winter 2021]

Nordic Rock
Darling Foundry, Montreal
February 27–August 29, 2020

By James D. Campbell

[Excerpt]
Vikky Alexander’s Nordic Rock is a rare extravaganza of the literal and the metaphorical, the real and the surreal. It provokes a counterpoint to and reappraisal of the massive scale of the imposing Darling Foundry Main Hall in which it is installed, while working seamlessly within it. The furniture in this subversive and repletely idealized showroom of an exhibition is the fitting sequel to Alexander’s Extreme Beauty retrospective in 2019 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The large exhibition hall, despite its imposing scale and impressive bulk, provides the perfect setting for Alexander’s stylized, non-utilitarian design furniture, including a bed, a chair, a night table, and so forth. Made of dichroic glass, an iridescent material that reflects light in a remarkably wide spectrum of colours that makes it attractive to both artists and architects, these consummately fragile constructs are presented on custom-made pedestals that effectively increase their allure, as if they were museological specimens in leisure space.¹ They are bracketed on the near and far wall planes by vinyl collages of landscapes and photographed texture, made up of images harvested from magazines, exterior landscapes, close-ups of textures, and sundry simulations of organic or vegetal matter, that unite all the tableaux in mortise-and-tenon fashion.
 

See the magazine for the complete article and more images: Ciel variable 116 – LANDSCAPES AS MIRRORS