“The_Inbetween_Forest is Leigh Barbier’s fourth exhibition at 60SIX, in which she presents a new series of portraits with a bold, abstract graphic style, alongside her signature detailed
narrative figurative scenes ( a diptych and triptych) and as always, evocative, surreal mixed media sculptures.
Barbier is immersed in the often fantastical movie special effects industry, working as as a digital painter at Industrial Light and Magic. Her work over the years with the avant-garde group, The Residents, with their surrealist lyrics and sounds is manifested in her theatrical surrealist aesthetic.
In The_Inbetween_Forest, several portraits and sculptures utilize thread and sewing, reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois, where the lines of the thread become drawings on the paintings, cross hatched to create a tone or creating a web, suggesting a spider’s trap or conversely suggesting psychological guarding and protecting. The thread drawings can act as a container to physically hold an object, i.e. the pine cone in “The Ruminator.”
Barbier’s world is imaginative, enchanting and sinister, and the work in this exhibition shows the artist stretching the boundaries of her practice, trusting her exploration of new visual vocabularies and allowing her imagination no limits.
