Opening Today: Vikky Alexander and Han Sungpil

TrépanierBaer is delighted to present The Woodlanders and Vanishing Field: A Memory of a Changing Earth, two solo exhibitions by internationally acclaimed artists Vikky Alexander and Han Sungpil.

A pioneering figure in appropriation art and photo conceptualism, Vikky Alexander has spent more than four decades examining how images of architecture, nature, beauty, and luxury shape desire. Her latest series, The Woodlanders (2025), brings idealized female figures drawn from fashion imagery into dense, dreamlike woodland settings. Comprising thirteen (13) images in an edition of three (3), the series marks a compelling reversal. In earlier works, Alexander introduced artificial nature into architectural interiors; in The Woodlanders, the human figure appears to be drawn back into the landscape, almost overtaken by nature. Yet this landscape remains mediated, assembled through reproduction and collage rather than encountered as pristine wilderness. The title resonates with Thomas Hardy’s novel The Woodlanders, in which human relationships, desire, class, and social ambition unfold within an ancient woodland community. It suggests figures who belong to, emerge from, or are psychologically transformed by the forest.

“In 2024 I read two books consecutively, a biography of the late designer, Alexander McQueen and Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Woodlanders”. The selection was serendipitous but also, as it turns out, fortunate. Looking through books of photographs of McQueen’s designs, I noticed that he often made pieces that were animal and bird like, transforming the mannequins into strange creatures. Hardy’s novel, set in a rural hamlet in the south of England, introduces characters that appear and disappear into the woods, somewhat of a ‘hide and seek’. In this series, sourcing my inspiration from a selection of McQueen’s designs, I have re-imagined them with collage as characters in the Hardy novel. The titles of the thirteen works are a combination of the names of some of McQueen’s friends and models, with the names of Hardy’s female protagonists. These women do not turn their back on nature but emerge in material and immaterial ways through holes and tangles — both literal techniques in my collage process and metaphors for the liminal spaces my figures inhabit. The holes I cut become portals of transformation, while the tangles of collage mirror the dense undergrowth where Hardy’s characters disappear and the complex construction of McQueen’s sculptural garments.” –  Vikky Alexander

Vikky Alexander lives and works in Montréal. Her work is held in major museums, private, and corporate collections throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. This is Vikky Alexander’s 13^th exhibition at TrépanierBaer.

In the Viewing Room

In conjunction with Vikky Alexander’s The Woodlanders, the gallery is delighted to present Han Sungpil’s latest series a suite of photogravures, Vanishing Fields: The Memory of a Changing Earth.

In the fall of 2025, Han Sungpil was invited to the renowned winery Rioja Alta (1890) to document the effects of climate change on the winery’s wine production methods. Spain, once known as the “orchard of Europe” and a primary source of fruit and vegetables, is bearing the severe consequences of rapid desertification and intensifying wildfire cycles. These pressures have reached into the country’s wine industry, which has been a longstanding, and vital cultural and economic tradition whose future is now increasingly shaped by the instability of the climate.

“At La Rioja Alta, I found the specific material language I had been searching for. Inside the winery’s centuries-old cellars, time has left its mark not in words but in substance: in the dark, wine-stained surfaces of oak barrels that have absorbed decades of fermentation, in the rust-coloured traces that bleed down cellar walls like geological strata, in the slow oxidation of wood that has held and shaped some of the most exceptional vintages in Spanish history. These are not merely aesthetic details. They are a form of archive, a record of accumulation, of seasons survived, of a winemaking tradition that has persisted across drought and abundance alike. To photograph these surfaces was to photograph time itself, compressed and made visible.

The scale and historical depth of La Rioja Alta’s aging cellars gave this work its center of gravity. The barrels, enormous and darkened by decades of use, stacked in vast underground chambers, carry within them the same question that has driven my practice from the beginning: how do the accumulated actions of humanity, across centuries, quietly reshape the world we inhabit? Here, that question becomes almost tactile. The stain of wine on wood, the slow alchemy of oak and fermentation, the labour of hands that harvest without machines; all of it speaks to a relationship between human culture and natural process that is now, under the pressure of climate change, profoundly vulnerable.” – Han Sungpil.

The photogravures were realized with the assistance of Brendan Copestake, Jullian Ross Print, Saskatoon, and Master print maker Alex Thomson, Edmonton. A portfolio of ten (10) images in an edition of three (3).

Han Sungpil lives and works in Calgary. He has exhibited and is collected worldwide. Monographs of his work include Intervention, 2017.

In the Promenade Gallery

In the Promenade Gallery, we are featuring selected mixed media works by Black American artist Alicia Henry, who sadly passed away in October of 2024. Alicia Henry created works that are deeply original, human and unforgettable and a series of ten selected works on paper from Jen Aitken’s Assembled Drawing series.

Please contact TrépanierBaer at info@tbg1.com or 403-244-2066 for more information.

We look forward to seeing you at the gallery.

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