Member's Spotlight Exhibition: Elham Bayati: Where Memory Blooms

Member's Spotlight Exhibition: Elham Bayati: Where Memory Blooms

Opening Reception:
October 7, 2026, 6-8 pm

In Where Memory Blooms, Iranian-born, Columbus-based artist Elham Bayati explores the ways memory, cultural identity, and personal experience shape our inner landscapes. Working across painting, collage, printmaking, and drawing, Bayati creates layered, dreamlike compositions where the familiar and imagined, beauty and melancholy, and past and present coexist.

Flowers and textiles are central to Bayati’s visual language. Inspired by the patterns of her grandmother’s scarves and her mother’s dressmaking fabrics, these motifs connect her to memories of family, home, and her Iranian upbringing. In her paintings, flowers and patterns emerge, overlap, and disappear beneath layers of imagery, reflecting the shifting nature of memory: what remains vivid, what becomes fragmented, and what is transformed over time.

This body of work also grew from Bayati’s emotional response to images of people whose lives were suddenly lost. Although she did not know them personally, their faces remained with her, prompting questions about how we can carry the memory of people and experiences we have never physically encountered. Through flowers, fabric, branches, fragments, and gestural marks, Bayati explores grief, tenderness, vulnerability, and resilience.

FREE and open to all.

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The Contemporary Dayton

Member's Spotlight Exhibition: Elham Bayati: Where Memory Blooms is taking place at The Contemporary Dayton, which is located at 25 W 4th Street in Dayton. The Contemporary Dayton - The Contemporary Dayton is a non-profit gallery and artist resource that provides art for the community and a community for artists. (Formerly Dayton Visual Arts Center / DVAC).