Artist Talk: Layered Landscapes

Artist Talk: Layered Landscapes

 

Join us for a group artist talk on Layered Landscapes, on view at North Van Arts' CityScape Gallery. Featuring exhibiting artists Rebecca Bayer, Biliana Velkova, Mohadese Movahed, and Jennifer Tazewell Mawby, this conversation offers an opportunity to learn more about the ideas, processes, and perspectives behind the exhibition.

Layered Landscapes explores how natural and built environments become vessels for memory, imagination, and cultural inheritance. Through painting, drawing, and sculpture, the exhibition considers landscape as more than a physical place—it is a living archive shaped by ecology, mythology, technology, history, and personal experience. Moving between forests, urban environments, and imagined worlds, the artists examine themes of belonging, displacement, identity, and the stories embedded within the spaces we inhabit.

During the talk, each artist will discuss their practice and the concepts informing their work, followed by a conversation about the exhibition's shared themes and approaches to landscape. Visitors will have the opportunity to gain deeper insight into the artworks and engage with the artists through a Q&A.

Whether you've already experienced the exhibition or are visiting for the first time, this event offers a deeper look into the layered relationships between place, memory, and imagination that shape our understanding of the world.

Artists

Rebecca Bayer’s forest paintings explore fragile ecosystems through close observation of shifting light. Grounded in an attentiveness to place, her work approaches landscape as a shared, living system.
www.rebeccabayer.com 

Biliana Velkova draws on Slavic folklore and Bulgarian cultural history to construct mythic landscapes where ritual, memory, and imagination intertwine. Her work reclaims storytelling as a spatial practice, mapping identity through legend and symbol.
www.bilianavelkova.ca 

Mohadese Movahed’s work approaches the built environment as a psychological and political site where personal memory and collective history converge. She creates hybrid urban landscapes to explore power, displacement, and cultural memory by bringing traditional Iranian architectural motifs into dialogue with her contemporary lived environments.
www.mohadesemovahed.com 

Jennifer Tazewell Mawby’s gestural drawings, paintings, and sculptures place the human figure within psychological and machine-generated environments. Her work questions how history, memory, and identity are constructed, mediated, and preserved.
www.jjtmstudio.com