Fiona Gladstone, editor. “Translation” issue, You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, cover/feature artist. Tucson, AZ: School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona, 2015.
For years, I explored history, colonialism and imperialism in text-laden map works (see US Future States Atlas, by Dan Mills). More recently, my work has focused more on visual components. Rather than including descriptive written text about specific aspects of real or imagined history, as in the previous work, these works consider history as a series of superimpositions and erasures. In each, I establish rules and systems based on written information on the map underneath. The resulting works translate the text into aesthetically codified colors, patterns, marks, and shapes that have been determined by the content of the map, but are no longer visible.
—Dan Mills, Translations
