Connextions: Untitled from Botanical Light by April Hickox

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Nine photo based window murals celebrate community. Building on the success of previous years, the Town of Oakville has once again taken the initiative to invite a fresh cohort of artists to showcase their photographic murals in neighbourhood community and cultural centres. This year's theme of "Connextions" resonates with the current times, as it urges us to reconnect and strengthen our community bonds.

April Hickox is a lens-based artist and a dedicated environmentalist. She is interested in our relationship to wilderness in urban culture, land stewardship, and sustainability. She has been producing work in the landscape that questions what is ‘wild’ and how we need to re-negotiate out relationship with our environment.

An active community leader and associate professor at OCAD University in Tkaronto/Toronto, she is the Founding Director of Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Tenth Muse Studio, and a founding member of Artscape, the founder of Women’s Photography Residency, now in its third year at Gibraltar Point Art Centre on the Toronto Islands. Exhibiting extensively with notable exhibitions including Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Surrey Art Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Oakville Galleries, and Tom Thompson Memorial Art Gallery. Recently a survey exhibit of her work was curated by Crystal Mowry for the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Recently her work Observance was presented as a 45-channel video installation in downtown Toronto and her video Avion will be included in 2023 Nuit Blanche this October.

The artist was born at the Oakville Trafalgar Hospital, grew up in Lorne Park, and moved to Toronto Island for university. All these locations have heightened her awareness of ways to build community that support the renewal and care of our green spaces

The artist offers about her practice:

With this work, I am reimagining photographically the history of botanical drawings done by women like Marianne North in the Victorian area. At the time women were not able to paint on site because of social pressure and they were thought to be too frail to travel. North’s mother knew her daughter Marianne was talented and how much she wanted to do plein air painting so before she died, she told Marianne she had to take care of her father. This allowed her to travel all over the world with her father, the head botanist of Kew Gardens, as he collected plant specimens for Queen’s Garden in London, England.

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• Website oakville.ca

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Town of Oakville

The Town of Oakville is located on Treaty 14 and 22 lands, the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and the Haudenosaunee. Oakville is home to many different First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. A vibrant and impressive community within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), the Town of Oakville is a beautiful lakeside town with a strong heritage, preserved and celebrated by residents and visitors alike. Since the 1800s, it has become one of the most coveted areas to live and work in Ontario with 225,000 residents calling Oakville home. The town offers all the advantages of a well-serviced urban centre with first-rate facilities and amenities, while also maintaining its small-town feel.

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