Millee Tibbs

Millee Tibbs’ work derives from her interest in photography’s ubiquity in contemporary culture and the tension between its truth-value and inherent manipulation of reality. Tibbs’ exhibition venues include the Blue Sky Gallery – Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, Portland, OR; the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA; Mary Ryan Gallery, NYC, NY; David Weinberg Photography, Chicago, IL; the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Licoln, MA; Brown University, Providence, RI; and Notre Dame University, IN. Her work has been published by the Humble Arts Foundation, Blue Sky Gallery, and Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. Tibbs’ work is in the permanent collections of the RISD Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and Fidelity Investments, and is also held in the Midwestern Photography Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and in the Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn flat file. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, VCCA, the Wurlitzer Foundation, Jentel, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and LPEP, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tibbs grew up in Alabama, completed an MFA at RISD in 2007, and is an assistant professor of photography at Wayne State University.

Artist Statement: Mountains + Valleys 

I am interested in surfaces and their relationship to what lies beneath – the discrepancy between what we see and what we know. I am drawn to photography because of its ubiquitous presence in our culture and its duplicitous existence as both an indexical representation of reality and a subjective construction of it. It is a slippery medium that easily shifts from scientific documentation of a moment in time to a subjective construction of reality. I am interested in the space where these qualities contradict each other and coexist simultaneously.

My current work focuses on the dichotomy between “landscape” (an intangible vista) and “place” (a tactile, inhabitable space). I am interested in the aesthetic framing of the landscape of the American West that perpetuates expansionist ideologies through the representation of unoccupied, and seemingly unoccupiable spaces. By disrupting the photographic image through physical interventions (folding, cutting, and sewing), my work responds to the limitations of the photographic illusion. Each image holds the tension between the expansive, inaccessible vista and the intimate, tactile experience of the photo-object.

Rachel Jump

Rachel Jump's black and white work explores themes addressing ideas of home, belonging, memory, and absence, and have been exhibited throughout the United States. Rachel is represented by Alibi Fine Art in Chicago, IL, and had her first major solo exhibition in November of 2015. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA PH’14), where she received the Harry Koorejian Memorial Scholarship in 2013 and the Haining Family Scholarship in 2012. Her photographs are a part of the RISD Museum Special Collections, where she was also a visiting artist in conjunction with the exhibition, America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now, in 2012. Rachel has taught at the Nantucket Island School of Design and the Arts and Maine Media Workshops + College and spent the last year working as a studio assistant for the photographer, Arno Rafael Minkkinen. Rachel lives and works in the Chicago area.

Rachel's solo exhibition, Origins, is currently open until December 24, 2015 at Alibi Fine Art in Chicago, IL. She will be giving an artist talk in conjunction with the exhibition on December 19, 2015 from 4:00-5:00pm. Check it out if you are in the area!

Artist Statement: Origins 

The core of my photographic practice stems from a place of pure empathy- a desire to share my story within the collective human experience. My visual trajectory has always centered on the disparate nature of my own family, and my desire to reconnect us.

For most of my childhood our lives were scattered over countless households. My disparate memories of these places merely composed a fragmented idea of home. Later in life I began to question how my identity was shaped without a point of origin. Photography provided a way in which I could eternalize these fleeting moments, a fiction entangled by my truth. As a way to cope with these feelings of isolation, I created a narrative hoping to connect these places and reunite my family. Through this shared experience, my family and I appear to search for one another within the various environments that divided us. As a result of our efforts to find solace and intimacy, I conjured a myth of a home; a sanctuary where my loved ones and I could finally belong.

My photographs are relics of loss; traces of a family that I tried to piece back together.

Sophie Barbasch

Sophie Barbasch is a photographer based in New York City. She earned her MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in Art and Art History from Brown University. Selected residencies include the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the Blue Mountain Center. Selected publications and awards include The Atlantic Online, Conveyor Magazine, and Photo Boite’s 30 Under 30 Women Photographers. She has exhibited internationally.

Project Statement: Fault Line

Fault Line is a project I am doing in the small coastal town of Brooklin, Maine. The protagonist is my younger cousin Adam, who lives there. I also photograph my brother, father, and other cousins. I chose the title because a fault line alludes to where the earth splits in an earthquake (a metaphor for a divided family with a complicated history) and also alludes to fault, or blame (I wonder, how does a family support each other, even when things aren't perfect?) My goal is to show the weight we all carry and how we are both connected and isolated from each other.

Scott Alario

Scott Alario was born in New Haven, CT in 1983 and currently lives and works between Providence, RI, and Alfred, NY, where he is a visiting assistant professor in the School of Art and Design at Alfred University. He received his MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013. His work has been included recently in exhibitions at Louis B. James, NY, 2013-14, and ClampArt, NY, 2013. In 2011 Alario was named one of seven emerging photographers to watch by Art New England. He is the recipient of a 2012 Fellowship Merit Award from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Alario's work is currently on view in a solo exhibition (til July 18) at Kristen Lorello, NY. 

What We Conjure 

I’m in the process of a body of work that has no end in sight. What We Conjure is an autobiographical story, a contemporary folk tale, one that I’m creating along with my partner, our five-year old and our dog.

The work consists of pictures that are made while tracking and documenting, collaboratively inventing and constructing. I follow intuition, daydreams, our daughter’s instruction, or carefully sketched out ideas; and I set them before a large format view camera. Using an 8 x 10 inch film camera connects me directly to the history of photography, and specifically, to a history of the family photograph. It’s a process I’ve come to love regardless how counter-intuitive it may seem amid today’s picture making technology. The view camera’s fidelity and rendering of tone is unrivaled, and its presence with a sitter creates a performance, its own unique drama.


I’m exploring my role as father through these pictures, and occasionally appear on the other side of the lens, implicated in the story we weave. There was a point when I found myself wandering, looking for a photograph, with fingers crossed. When I became a parent I felt an urge to tell stories and so set out to make a fable for my daughter. Along the way, reality has leaked into our myth. We are on a search for the spiritually significant, the magic in every day. What will we find that’s worth passing down? What will we conjure?