Dan Mills, essay by Phong Bui. 56 page hardcover catalogue. Limited Edition (includes a one-of-a-kind work of art). Santa Monica: Perceval Press, Brooklyn: Booklyn Artists Alliance, 2010.
Atlas available from Perceval Press.
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
