Why stop at 50? As Dan Mills points out in the mock manifesto accompanying his terrific show at Sherry Frumkin, these United States of ours cohered over time—starting with 16 territories in the 18th century, adding 29 in the 19th, and five more in the 20th. "As we consider U.S. history," he writes, "a pattern of expanding by at least five states every fifty years exists, with the exception of the last fifty or so. We clearly having some catching up to do."
—Leah Ollman, Los Angeles Times, Dan Mills at Sherry Frumkin, October 30, 2009
If one were to place Mills’s work in the context of recent art history, among contemporary artists who have been galvanized by similar political themes, then he belongs in the rare company of no more than four or five artists, notably Öyvind Fahlström and Mark Lombardi.
Mills considers imperialism a
mediating form that exists between fact and fiction; in this moral maelstrom
one thing one is certain: his object of desire inevitably will become our
object of desire. Like Fahlström and Lombardi, whose works resist any kind of
easy reading of the artist’s political vision of the world, Mills found his
refuge in conceptual density and minimal lightness. Ultimately, what holds our
interest in Mills’s work is the tension between what is read and what is seen.
It’s no longer imagined. It’s made.
—Phong Bui, US Future States Atlas, 2009
It’s no longer ruled. It’s owned.
—Arundhati Roy
When we look back less than a decade and consider the results of U.S. foreign policy decisions, predicated on and driven by long- and short-term global military-industrial ambitions, they have not been much less surprising or absurdly self-centred than the picture painted by artist Dan Mills' conceptual project US Future States Atlas. When we look back at U.S. foreign policy since the Mexican-American War in the 1840s and right through to the freshly-minted Obama administration's stances on the Middle East (particularly as regards its continuation of the disastrous Israel-Right-Or-Wrong position of previous U.S. administrations), the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and, most significantly, the unquestioned and clearly-stated intention to continue, through a sustained massive global military presence, to act unilaterally whenever, wherever and with whatever force the U.S. government alone deems appropriate, the predictable imperialist picture seems quite clear.
—Viggo Mortensen, Perceval Press, 2009
It was during this tumultuous period that Dan Mills began his US Future States Atlas, a project that underlies much of the work here. Ultimately published in book form by Percival Press in 2009, it was begun in early March of 2003, that turbulent period between the commencement of the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. Mills was inspired by the realization that, with the right language, it would be possible to justify just about any imperialist intervention into the affairs of sovereign countries.
—Eleanor Heartney, "Delusions of Grandeur," Meditations on Empire exhibition catalogue, 2009