Millee Tibbs: Air / Plains

Millee Tibbs: Air / Plains

In her series, Air/Plains, artist Millee Tibbs revisits the ever-familiar image of the setting sun. During the course of two weeks working in the Great Plains region of central Nebraska, Tibbs photographed the sun each evening as it disappeared over the horizon. Back in the studio, she produced the images as pigment prints, folded them into common paper airplane designs, and re-photographed the objects. The title of the series refers to the content of the image—the sky and earth—and also to the object into which the photograph has been folded. The resulting images hold the illusionistic space of the landscape while documenting the folding, creasing, and scoring that give them form. In this way, Tibbs draws attention to the photograph as object and meditates on our tendencies to often mistake a picture for the thing itself.

Millee Tibbs is a Detroit-based artist and photographer. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Vassar College in New York. Tibbs’ works are held in notable public and private collections including the George Eastman Museum in New York, the Portland Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and the Fidelity Investments permanent collection. Tibbs is the recipient of two MacDowell Colony fellowships and has been awarded numerous national and international artist residencies, most recently from the Marpha Foundation in the Mustang District of Nepal. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues including Blue Sky Gallery in Portland and Holding House in Detroit, and has been included in group exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia, SF Camerawork in San Francisco, Aperture Foundation in New York, the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. Tibbs is an associate professor of photography at Wayne State University.

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