New & Emerging
May 20 – July 5, 2025
New & Emerging, juried by artist Sara Khan, artist Michelle Sound, and Seymour Art Gallery’s curator/director Vanessa Black, is an exhibition that provides exposure to emerging artists.
This fresh and eclectic show presents work by each of the ten exhibiting artists in a range of media including painting, ceramics, paper works, mixed media installation, photography, and textile.
Artists: Jocelyn Andress, Laura Ayres, Angie Heintz, Homa Khosravi, Roxanna Lewon, Nico McGiffin, Azadeh Mehryar, Luke Pardy and Liz Perry
Exhibition Reception: Sunday, June 1, 2025 from 2 – 4 p.m.
Special thanks to Opus Art Supplies North Vancouver for their support of this exhibition.
Jocelyn Andress
Jocelyn Andress is a multidisciplinary artist working across various media including painting, drawing, and textiles. Influenced by the design and conceptual elements of Art Nouveau, her work frequently involves floral imagery which she uses to elicit notions of womanhood. Through this lens, she explores themes of beauty, life, and death, as well as the relationship florals have to interior domestic spaces versus exterior environments. Andress’ work also explores intergenerational art-making within her own family, and the gendering of craft and textiles. In this series of paintings, the patterns and layering of images reference homemade textiles including pillowcases, quilts, wallpaper, and other arts of the home.
Laura Ayres
Laura Ayres’ photography explorers the lasting power of images – both as a physical object and as a distant representation of memory. Working with a combination of original photography, family archives, and found photographs, her practice investigates themes of memory, loss, and the passage of time. Through the delicate craft of embroidery, in this series ‘Threads of Time,’ she stitches onto these photographs carefully chosen words and phrases all surrounding the theme of “forever”. Exploring the ways in which words can enhance a photograph and amplify the value of a visual narrative, this series focuses on the photograph as an object and its ability to last several years, often outlasting the subjects depicted in them.
Angie Heintz
Painter Angie Heintz’s work meditates on themes of transparency, settlement, dwelling and belonging. This painting series uses references from slides that Heintz’s grandmother took while traveling British Columbia in the 1900’s. During this time she captured hundreds of images, often with her shadow reflecting on the landscape. These images mark places that have witnessed the dispossession and displacement of marginalized people. Heintz says her grandmother viewed this land through the rose colored lens of her camera, and never spoke of its past. By painting from her transparencies, Heintz is interested in highlighting the multiple layers of these places; giving weight to the poetry and subtleties that exist in the many layers, written and erased.
Homa Khosravi
Homa Khosravi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver. Her work touches on surrealism, abstraction and world-building with various “more than human” creatures. Inspired by Persian gardens and her Iranian heritage, she weaves cultural symbolism with imaginative forms and shapes. In this body of work, she investigates nighttime scenes and landscapes, offering an alternative reading of nature and the unknown. These paintings explore the tension between beauty and obstruction, order and chaos, inviting the viewer to navigate the hidden spaces between them.
Roxanna Lewon
Roxanna Lewon is a mixed media artist whose work explores the organic qualities of materials, often using textiles and soft sculpture to reflect the textures and forms found in nature. Growing up surrounded by the natural beauty of the West Coast, she draws deep inspiration from the environment. Roxanna is pursuing a degree in Visual Arts where she is constantly experimenting with new mediums and techniques. Her practice is rooted in hands-on, labour intensive process, whether it’s working with fabric, metal, or other materials, as she seeks to capture the essence of natural forms through a commitment to experimentation, process and materiality.
Nico McGiffin
Nico McGiffin primarily creates sculptures, but their practice extends into forms of writing such as list-making, journal entries and essays. Nico’s work is informed by replication, desire, and most importantly; encounters with objects. Through the replication of ambiguous thrift store objects, McGiffin’s sculptures question our willingness to assume function based on physicality. Riffing off archival research and object function, their work intertwines the actual and immaterial ideas we hold about bodies while simultaneously addressing the influence of the patriarchy on queer subcultures.
Azadeh Mehryar
Azadeh Mehryar is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, specializing in ceramics. Inspired by historical artifacts and through juxtaposing elements of contemporary culture and Persian art, Azadeh creates work that explores cultural hybridity. With regard to the geometry that is present in the Persian art and her personal experience of living in diaspora, her work seeks to navigate a realm in which the two cultures cross paths; the realm that informs her cultural identity, bridging her past and present in response to her diasporic journey.
Luke Pardy
Luke Pardy is an interdisciplinary artist working between photography, performance, and installation. His work investigates settler relations to land through interactions with landscapes, architecture, the body, and ephemera. Pardy works to unsettle dominate historical perspectives and create relational, responsible, and accountable ways of being through contemporary art. These works result from a two-year research-creation process addressing their maternal family’s history of migration on the Oregon Trail.
Liz Perry
Liz Perry is a visual artist who blends elements of abstraction and realism to explore themes of identity, resistance, and personal reflection. In this series Imperfect Presence, Liz sets out to capture what remains when we stop performing, perfecting, or polishing. Each portrait is stripped down to the essential: a face, a gaze, a presence. The paintings are raw and unrefined by design—blended, washed out, and often incomplete. Liz uses rough brushstrokes to allow the forms to blur and the colors to drift, creating a sense of vulnerability. Rather than perfect likenesses, —they’re emotional impressions, soft moments held loosely.