Dan Mills: US Future States Atlas

Sherry Frumkin Gallery
Santa Monica

September 17 - November 7, 2009

Mills began these 35 works on paper in 2003 as a “visual/text exercise” cum wry letter-to-the-editor in response to the increasingly belligerent political and military stance of the US towards other countries. Using justifications by US government officials for going to war with Afghanistan and their impending invasion of Iraq (as well as previous chapters of US history) Mills found that by conceptually pushing this global stance it was possible to justify taking over almost any country. So he did. By the end of 2007 Mills had created maps depicting forty-seven new states and an additional District of Columbia. This body of drawings had become for Mills “a grand narrative atlas of global imperialism…in which strategies, rules, and doctrines develop and unfold which at various times are absurd, painful, humorous, and also frighteningly believable.” The works taken together form both the exhibition and the book "US Future States Atlas," just released by Santa Monica based Perceval Press.