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11/9/2009

Dan Mills

Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Santa Monica

SHERRY FRUMKIN GALLERY is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of work by artist Dan Mills. US Future States: an atlas of global Imperialism opens on Saturday, September 12th with a reception for the artist from 6 to 9 pm. The exhibition will run through November 7, 2009.

Mills began these 35 works on paper in 2003 as a “visual/text exercise” cum wry letter-to-theeditor 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. In each of these works, Mills begins with an actual image of the country or “state” he is interested in taking over as part of United States Global (USG). (Note: USA + USG = United States Empire [USE]). Sometimes, as in the case of "New Venice" (formally Venezuela), new states are more than one country, made up of bits and pieces of a few adjacent countries, or divided up into separate states. The new regions are painted in either one or a few garish colors. Mills’s handwritten notes on each map provide a brief history of the area, its relationship to the US, and a series of reasons for takeover under the heading “Rationale for Takeover and Future Statehood” which might include, in the case of “USE West Africa Namibia Minerale,” for example, “a preponderance and preference for USG states to be located on an ocean or a sea attached to an ocean” and the fact that “oil and gas are available for export.”

In his essay for the US Future States Atlas, Phong Bui writes that Mills’s long standing interest in collage “has given him the freedom to accumulate visual data from the external world.” That and a deepening interest in global political subjects are internalized and infused with a “keen insight” in this “highly personal sequence of constructed imagery executed in a form that shifts back and forth between representation and abstraction.” Bui places Mills in the “rare company of no more than four or five contemporary artists who have been galvanized by similar political themes – most notably, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Mark Lombardi.”

Dan Mills’s work is the subject of an upcoming exhibition “Meditiations on Empire” at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Art Museum opening in December 2009. Recent solo exhibitions include American Icons & Morphs at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, and Empire at Lychburg College and Millersville University, and Detector at Northern Illinois University Art Museum Gallery in Chicago. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions including What War? At White Box in New York, Lines on the Earth: Maps, Power and the Imagination at Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Ketchum, ID, Misleading Trails at China Art Archives and Warehouse in Beijing and traveled the US for two years, and Long March: Yan’an Project Retrospective at Long March Space in Beijing. In addition to his career as an artist, Mills has curated over 50 exhibitions since the mid-1980s which have been presented at institutions including the Chelsea Art Museum in NY, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles. He is director of the Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Dan Mills will be in present for the opening of his exhibition and will sign copies of the Atlas. He will also speak at the September 13th Categorically Not event held at the Santa Monica Art Studios http://categoricallynot.com/upcomingevents.html. The topic for the night’s installment of this occasional series of conversations is “The Worlds we Make Up” and will also include Pulitzer Prize winning music critic Tim Page and host and noted science writer KC Cole whose new book on Frank Oppenheimer, Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up has just been released. Signed copies of their books will be available. Mills is on the board of the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries (ACUMG), an affiliate group of AAM, which will meet at the Hammer Museum on Friday and Saturday the 18th and 19th of September.

Opening Saturday, September 12th 6 – 9 pm

Sherry Frumkin Gallery
3026 Airport Ave. (Studio 21) - Santa Monica
Wed – Sat 12 to 6
Free admission

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