Artist and filmmaker Codi Barbini draws inspiration from resilience, transformation, communication and the ways people continue forward through life’s challenges.
Flowers serve as both subjects and symbols in her paintings: conceptual entry points and vehicles for feeling. Something we cultivate, spend time looking at, and communicate through. Flowers move through our lives as markers of birth and death, illness, celebration, grief, and love. Barbini explores that emotional weight through color and gesture.
Her paintings often incorporate found materials, Western magazines, rodeo advertisements, agricultural publications, and archival imagery, grounding the work within a distinctly American mythology. She is drawn to their textures, typography, and visual language: faded ink, grainy photographs, and bold headlines. These materials speak to histories of labor, endurance, freedom, and self-reliance, themes that recur throughout her practice.
Alongside her studio work, Barbini has directed and edited documentary films centered on stories of resilience, survival, and human connection. Working across mediums has deepened her interest in how meaning is constructed through images. Whether assembling a film or building a painting, she engages in a process of observation, selection, layering, and rhythm, searching for moments that reveal something essential about the human experience.
“There’s something uniquely beautiful about creating work during a residency. It has a clear beginning and end, so the work becomes a record not just of the making, but of time.”