This is a guest post from Nshan Melkonian, art writer and Gallery Supervisor at Spike Island.
A majestic view interwoven with ridges and a river takes shape, while folds traverse the photo in harmonious fashions fragmenting the terrain. Mountains + Valleys (Yellowstone #4) is one of the coloured prints in Millee Tibbs’ experimental photography open air exhibition at Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC). It is among the show’s most perceptually cunning images. From the result of repeated creasing, fourteen implicit lines branch out to the edge of the print, brilliant light and shadow are formed, and a two-dimensional photo transforms into three. The mountaintops and trees bend and quiver, reaching new heights as the paysage juts into liquid blue sky.
‘Landscape’ provides no shortage of scenic views, such as Air/Plains (August 3, 2013 ‘Solar Jet’) and Air/Plains (August 5, 2013 ‘Floating Dart’), which emerge as snapshots from Tibbs’ Art Farm residency in Central Nebraska. The resulting works archive two weeks of sunset photos taken at the Great Plains. Air/Plains is exactly these two things, the open air and sky, but also the paper plane object that it is folded into. The plains and flashes of sunsets provide filmic glimpses of her pastoral life. For the viewer: nostalgia for a moment that never happened.
Influenced by Ansel Adams and the idealisation of land during America’s westward expansion, Tibbs critics this nineteenth-century expansionist rhetoric and articulates the parallel between photography and perception, re-examining the canon of landscape photography. Her illusionistic work additionally stems from her fascination with Op Art movement artists Victor Vasarely, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Josef Albers. In her series Ansel on Adams she studies two artists, joining their classic and avant-garde styles. Best represented in Albers on Adams #1, the artist appropriates both an Ansel Adams photo and a Josef Albers design by sewing one to the other. This creates a post-modern tinge that is reflected throughout much of her work. Even though reticent of her views on Ansel Adams—which she describes as, ‘a hate and love relationship’—Tibbs’ use of Adams’ naturalism, joined by rigid geometric forms, creates a visual vernacular unique to her work.
An activity possibly overlooked, but core to Tibbs’ presented work, is mountaineering. In her artist talk at the PRSC she noted her trips through the French and Swiss alps, where she hiked hundreds of miles with her photography gear to capture epic stills seen in her series Mount Analogue. These black and white pieces are incredibly dense; imposing mountains black as shadow ripple and wane in-between impossible shapes, yet at the same time they feel diaphanous like a pale silver curtain held to the sun. These manual acts of sewing, cutting and folding, or ‘dark room sleight of hand’ as she states, creates a duplicity: a representational landscape combined with an illusory object.
These pieces were selected by Real Photography Company (RPC) director and curator Justin Quinnell, from her international showcase in July at Barcelona’s Experimental Photo Festival. A collection of images from RPC locals also lies adjacent to her work, highlighting the multiplicity of photography techniques. While only displayed as wall pasted prints, Tibbs’ work maintains the same evocation as her framed digital ones. Her images have a peculiar plasticity. And this brings attention to their artifice and formal qualities, i.e. line, contrast, space, form, and composition, which, for the most part, can be overlooked in traditional photography. Her devices create tension between the photos truth-value and manipulation of reality, and that is what makes them pop. At its best, Tibbs’ work is a breath of fresh air and invites us to look again, promising that there is always something new to uncover.
Millee Tibbs’ ‘Landscape’ is on show at Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft in Bristol, UK for its last day today. After this it will travel to a wall under the M32 in Eastville, Bristol, UK.
See more of Millee’s work: milleetibbs.com | @sbbiteellim