Mount Analogue by Millee Tibbs

Issue 146

Landscape is a highly-charged symbol at the service of specific ideologies, representing the projected identity and desires of those who use it. While it can produce delight in the viewer, it can also naturalize power relations, and erase history and legibility. I am drawn to it precisely because of this duality.

My current work combines landscape photography and darkroom sleight of hand. Using photographic images of mountains as a surrogate for the sublime experience, “Mount Analogue” explores the paradoxical relationship between photography, which can only represent what is in front of the camera’s lens, and the ineffable nature of the sublime experience. Using a single negative and multiple exposures in the darkroom, I create illusory abstract geometries that overlay and redefine my romantic mountains photographs. Through this process, I examine the mind’s attempt to rationalize and tame that which exceeds the limits of perception.

The formal strategies I employ in this work are informed by Modernist Op Artists who used abstraction to challenge the nature of vision. Like them, I am interested in the space between what we see and what we know. I employ these visual phenomena through photography, a medium intrinsically tied to optical vision.

Millee Tibbs (she/her/hers) is an artist living in Detroit, MI

www.milleetibbs.com

@sbbiteellim