In the Empire Paintings battle scenes and military weapons are transformed into decorative near-abstractions, a comment on the aestheticization of our more destructive impulses.
Finally, the Empire Paintings are abstracted compositions of military topographies and battle imagery. For this series, Mills creates nearly benign landscapes of war that are executed as painterly and visually seductive images, complete with color coordinated borders. Again, the works are like Rorschach tests that serve as a gauge of the viewer’s attitudes toward military violence in the service of conquest.
—Eleanor Heartney, “Delusions of Grandeur,” Meditations on Empire exhibition catalogue, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts Museum, and Mandeville Gallery, Union College, 2009-10.
