Victoria Arts Council
PROJECT SPACE
670 Fort Street
July 2025 – June 2026
Unique art presentations across the three windows on Fort Street
Amplifying our public presence over the coming year, the Victoria Arts Council’s Project Space at 670 Fort Street will host four unique window installations by local, national, and internationally-recognized artists.
Project curator, and VAC executive director, Kegan McFadden notes that the Council’s presence downtown has taken many forms over the decades from traditional exhibitions, to large-scale community projects, to storefront installations. Since opening the Project Space in January of this year, the VAC hosted an evolving exhibition in the form of an experimental reading room/library, titled ANOTHER LIFE, where interpretations of what makes a book and where printed matter enters the realm of contemporary art was the focus.
The project, [WINDOW][WINDOW][WINDOW] builds on the VAC’s partnership with The Bay Centre, and contributes to the long history of contemporary artists activating storefronts for means beyond the commercial, and will be viewable from the street at all times of day and night.
From vinyl wraps to collage to banners and hand-painted imagery, [WINDOW][WINDOW][WINDOW] will showcase one artist at a time in three-month-long presentations from July 2025 – June 2026.
These presentations are supported financially by CRD Arts Services Branch, BC Arts Council’s Community Arts Program, and the Province of BC’s Community Gaming Fund, with additional consideration courtesy of The Bay Centre and STEPS Public Art.
[WINDOW][WINDOW][WINDOW] is inaugurated with an installation by Vikky Alexander.
In February of 2014, on a trip to Tokyo, I wandered around the shopping district of Aoyama.
The district was predominantly high end retail boutiques, such as Prada, Comme des Garçons and Roberto Cavalli.
It had just snowed, a rare occurrence in Tokyo.
Following my 2009 series ‘Paris Showrooms,’ and a much earlier series from1992, ‘West Edmonton Mall’, I took photographs of the streets as reflected in the shop windows, visually sandwiching the indoor displays with the passersby.
I chose the circular framing device to refer in, a self-conscious way, to scopophilia — the love of looking.
The photographs are characterized by my ongoing consideration of illusion and material desires framed within the language of architecture and design. The works examine how these formal signs reveal and shape meaning in contemporary culture, bringing to the foreground discussions of late-capitalism and its commodification of culture. The photographs also foreground a utopian desire within the parameters of fantasy and cultural longing.
These are consistent themes in my work. – VA
Vikky Alexander (b. 1959, Victoria, BC) is a Montreal-based artist celebrated for her ongoing contributions to Pictures Generation strategies of critique by appropriation. Engendering a quietly reflective feminism that investigates the power of framing devices within the architectures of corporate branding, her works assess the fetishistic, bureaucratized and aspirational—generating recombinatory mixtures of appropriated scenes of natural landscapes and typifications of beauty that demarcate the romanticization of nature and the naturalization of romance. Activating a jarring fracture between embodied experience and its idealized presentation, her sensual and stylized works spanning installation, sculpture, photography, and video cumulatively denature the commercial annexation of personal capacities for self-reflection.
Vikky Alexander’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Dia Art Foundation, New York; White Columns, New York; Musée d’ art moderne et contemporain, Genève; Downs & Ross, New York; New Museum, New York; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal; International Center of Photography, New York; Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; Canada House, London; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Barbican Art Gallery, London; and Yokohama Civic Art Gallery, Yokohama. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the International Center of Photography; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Deste Foundation, among numerous others. A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, she lives and works in Montreal, Quebec. Upcoming presentations of her work include exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; and Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano.
This special presentation of Tokyo Showrooms will be the first exhibition of Alexander’s work on the Canadian west coast since her survey with the Vancouver Art Gallery, Extreme Beauty, in 2020.