PAST SHOWS

Hannah Nowlan
Elizabeth Barnett
Katie Daniels
Stephen Baker
Sean Mealik
Sean Fennesy
Marc Martin
Lauren Cassar
Bobby Clark
Elizabeth Barnet
Spencer Shakespeare
Adriana Picker

Cassie Byrnes
Belynda Henry
Stephen Baker &
Sarah Kelk
Evi O
Skye Jefferys
ASRC Exhibition
Fred Fowler
Laura Jones

Barbara Kitallides

       Decoding the Jungle is the latest collection of works by Melbourne-based artist Barbara Kitallides.

In this series, Barbara Kitallides navigates the emotional jungle that sometimes lives within and around us. Through her abstract landscapes, Barbara explores the chaos of both our physical and emotional worlds. The resulting works are where these two worlds intersect.

Barbara approaches each painted landscape from dual perspectives – from the sky looking down and from the ground looking up – giving each work a layered complexity.
It is the artist’s desire to connect both perspectives and analyse their commonality, discovering that they habitually co-exist.  

Barbara’s influences are apparent in the overall feel, technique and palette adopted in this body of work. The artist cites the pop colours and flat black of Andy Warhol’s screen prints, Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach’s personality inkblot test, and the romantic undertones of Australian landscape artists as key reference points.

The presence of colour in Decoding the Jungle is psychological. The contrasting nature of the palette symbolises the spectrum of human emotion: candy pink represents the heart, the deep and alluring camouflage green embodies the jungle, while the intense golden yellow and orange is a vehicle for new and unchartered opportunities that await. Acting as an antagonist, and indicative of our personal fears, is the heavy black acrylic, simultaneously liberating and repressing the surrounding movement and colour.

On a surface level, each artwork in this series takes on the abstract form, but when inspected a little more closely, presents itself as a unique jungle landscape. The works in Decoding the Jungle invite the audience to navigate and explore their own personal jungle, and seek clarity through the lush density of the jungle labyrinth.

‘It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder’ – Grand Master Flash