April Hickox

Since Hickox move to the Toronto Islands at an early age, she has experienced the frequent change of the island's environment caused by human intervention. The relationship between natural landscape and human intervention has been considered by Hickox and become a central theme of her work for over thirty-five years.[6]

A lot of Hickox's work contains images of collected objects, from either people on the Toronto islands or her own collection such as the series named Gather.[7]

Crystal, Porcelain, Glass is a series of photos of broken tea cups or the fragments of various broken objects. They were either held by a variety of hands in various positions or being repaired and stacked in what appears to be a fragile tower. All of the broken objects belong to an older woman who had died on the Toronto Islands.[2] They were collected by Hickox from a bridge that is often called the free bridge.[2] In an interview, Hickox described her work as "a recycle of life and change".[2] From this project, Hickox started to think about people who were gone, the houses that were clearly lost and what was left behind. This work eventually led into the series Landscape + Memory: An Island History in 2003.

Memento is a series of images of family heirlooms, which incorporate a photographic element. All the heirlooms were collected from Hickox's female friends and have been passed down through generations.[8] There is always an intimate story behind each heirloom, the objects act as reminders of loved ones who have passed away.[8] However, all the photographic portraits from the heirlooms are rarely identified and the significance of the photos has been shifted. Memento not only records all the stories but also helps to reflect the fragility of the connection and physicality.[8]

Since Toronto Islands contains one of Toronto's oldest residential communities, the work Landscape + Memory: An Island History explores the links between the physical landscape, as it is today, and the memories of that landscape. All the sites in Hickox's photographs were once part of a thriving community whose homes were demolished in the 1950s.[9] The photographs record how the land has changed after the demolition of the homes, capturing the remaining flora and landscape that now covers the resident's old home in each photo.[2] Hickox demonstrates this work as the "traces and evidence of the past".[2]

Point Pelee: Landscape and Memory was commissioned by The Art Gallery of Windsor in 2003.[2] Point Pelee has a similar history to the Toronto Island in that it was once a vibrant community before the land was purchased in the 1970s to develop a national park.[10] Over the years, Hickox has observed the changes that have taken place in the park and documented the overlapping layers of human and natural histories through photographing. The exhibition aims to "evoke a dialogue on the history of our region, environmental issues, and the way in which communities evolve over time".[10] According to Hickox, the big difference between the project Point Pelee: Landscape and Memory and Landscape + Memory: An Island History is that there are less traces and evidence of the past found in the project Point Pelee.[10] Since people tried to plant new indigenous species in the park, the residents plants had been removed.[10]

As an artist as well as a mother to a deaf daughter, April Hickox started to explore the photographic works on the themes of language, communication and voice which had become her main focus in the past ten years.[2]

Can You Hear Flowers? was produced based on Hickox's personal experience as a mother to a deaf daughter.[11] These experiences were transformed into a site specific work outside the Power Plant in Toronto.[11] According to April Hickox, "the garden consisted of four sensory gardens. The idea for this work came from the question of a deaf child.[11] Adult responses impact on a child's perception of the world around her.[11]"

Within Dialogue is an installation work which consists of 100 photographs of mouths in the motion of communication.[12] In 2000, The Globe and Mail reviewed an April Hickox's exhibition Within Dialogue in Toronto's Leo Kamen Gallery in the news article Hickox's Photographs "Speak Eloquently from Silence".[13] It was mentioned that the 150, small, black and white photographs of mouths embodies Hickox's fascination with the mouth and paradoxical silence.[13] The diverse pictures of the human mouth reflect a wide range of potential identities from the deaf to the hearing.[13] There is also a sense of associated emotional and personal experiences as the mother to a deaf daughter.[13] April Hickox also collaborated with Tom Third on the audio component of Within Dialogue to provide viewers an infused experience of sound and silence.[12]

Hickox often uses photography as media to record images of women or female objects from the past, she mainly focuses on how they reflect female identity and self-recognition throughout time.[14]

This series of works, completed between 1972 and 1973, contains fourteen images of Barbie doll clothing to reflect how gender stereotypes are imposed by social structures and pressures, ultimately expressed through popular media of the society.[15] There are fictional conversations constructed under the typical representational clothes from women's magazine.[15] Barbie doll clothes largely reflected the changing trends in women's clothing and lifestyle since their creation.[15] Hickox borrows the Barbie doll clothes and combines them with a new narrative to present the changes in not only the representations of women over time but also the changing thoughts and life experiences of women throughout recent history.[15]

This series of work consists of 9 portraits of women over 50 in age.[16] In these black and white photographs, the women display a reflective look while closing their eyes.[16] In this series Hickox is trying to explore the inner strength of these women and question the relationship between these women and the viewers of the images, questioning photography as the means for communication.[16] The representations of women were derived based on the concept of women being the carrier of family memories over generations.[16] However, in contemporary meda, mature women usually appear invisible compared their young and beautiful counterparts, while their experiences and values are also underestimated by society.[16] From viewing the thought provoking portraits, one could reduce the misunderstanding of the mature woman from who they truly are.[16]

Echo, 2010These works are representing different types of hand-mirrors as a traditional female object.[17] People would use the mirrors to see their reflection make the adjustments to their makeup/hair that they felt they needed. These actions made Hickox consider about the self-being presented in the public, and that that self may be different from the ones we truly are and what we truly believe.[17] Nevertheless, the mirrors being photographed are unable to reflect as the mirror images are transformed into a sea of black by the scanning process. The reflection is no longer available.[17]

These works picture a young girl in different moments of her life.[5] According to Hickox, these photos of a young female represents snapshots of her daughter's life in the information age.[5] She demonstrates her work as "I see these images not so much as a portrait of my daughter, but as a portrait of a moment in time that could exist in the lives of many women in our Digital Age".[5] Therefore, these works bridge the dialogue between this general representation of moments of a young female and many other women's life moments.[18]

This work consists of five portraits of couples gazing toward the viewers in various settings.[19] These photographs were a commissioned work for the Toronto base 10x10 Photography Project to celebrate the LGBT Canadians in the arts.[19]

This series of work consists of over 90 public installation pieces of life-size photographs of city staff (farmers, gardeners, lifeguards, maintenance workers, etc.) on the Toronto Islands between 2009 and 2013.[20] In the CBC interview of April Hickox, it was mentioned that the City staff are an important part of the local community who produced the opportunity to relax with their hard works.[21] According to April Hickox, these workers should be recognized for their investments in jobs physically, emotionally and spiritually toward building the safe and beautiful environments.[20] In fact, the installations of the works actually made the workers happy by recognizing them instead for their contribution to the city, instead of being invisible to the general public.[21] April Hickox was appreciated by the islanders for drawing attention to these workers and reminding them not to take the environment for granted.[21] April and colleagues presented the photographs to the visitors, making the social engagement and interactions between the installed photographs and viewers possible.[21]