Garden of distortions: Artist Vikky Alexander mirrors famous gardens to reflect and then re-reflect an infinite and timeless place, inducing a kind of cultural vertigo Final Edition

• Published in: The Vancouver sun (1986)
• Main Author: Michael Scott, Sun Art Critic
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Vancouver, B.C Postmedia Network Inc 08.02.1999
• Subjects: Art galleries & museums; Artists; Contemporary art; Gardens & gardening; Panoramas
• ISSN: 0832-1299

Years later, those photos became the central feature of Vaux-le- Vicomte Panorama, [Vikky Alexander]'s meditation on the way we experience space. In this installation, Alexander projects her summertime panoramas on one wall in front of which she has positioned eight mirrored columns. The perspective lines suggested by the columns are extensions of similar lines (in the projected photographs) created by [Andre Le Notre]'s careful arrangement of terrace, promenade and canal. It is an eerie way of pulling the two-dimensional projected landscapes into the three-dimensional reality of the gallery space; or conversely of throwing us into the projected space of Alexander's snapshots. Heightening that sensation are the crisp shadows that viewers of the piece throw against the projected surface as they move past, as if silhouettes of their bodies were actually in the landscape. And then the mirrored columns themselves (an idea that came to Alexander in a night club with mirrored walls to maximize dancefloor light shows) further fragment the space and the projected images that are bounding around in it. It is possible to stand near the entrance of Vaux-le-Vicomte Panorama and see the original landscape shots, projected huge on the end wall, staccato fragments of those images reflecting off the mirrored columns, and then reflections of the reflections. As senior artist Ian Wallace observes in his extremely dense catalogue essay, Alexander is playing here "on the cusp between reality and artifice." Color Photo: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun / ALTERNATE VIEW: Vikky Alexander ; Color Photo: VAUX-LE-VICOMTE PANORAMA: Projected landscape photos of 17th-century French gardens and mirrored reflections create tantalizing idea of space. ;