A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism. VIKKY ALEXANDER

About

In Jill's neighborhood there was a giant billboard advertisement for a perfume called Obsession. It was mounted over the chain grocery store at which she shopped, and so she glanced at it several times a week. It was a close-up black-and-white photograph of an exquisite girl with the fingers of one hand pressed against her open lips. Her eyes were fixated, wounded, deprived. At the same time, her eyes were flat. Her body was slender, almost starved, giving her delicate beauty the strange, arrested sensuality of unsatisfied want. But her fleshy lips and enormous eyes were sumptuously, even grossly abundant. The photograph loomed over the toiling shoppers like a totem of sexualized pathology, a vision of feeling and unfeeling chafing together. It was a picture made for people who can't bear to feel and yet still need to feel. It was a picture by people sophisticated enough to fetishize their disability publicly. It was a very good advertisement for a product called Obsession.

– Mary Gaitskill, "The Dentist," Because They Wanted To, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 137

The work of Vikky Alexander (b. 1959, Victoria, British Columbia) has been presented in significant exhibitions 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, New York; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; 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, 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 include exhibitions at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.