Dan Mills: Meditations on Empire

When I was in College – a million years ago – the time wasting activity of choice was the game of Risk. Our dormitory lounge was filled almost twenty four hours a day with students avoiding school work in the pursuit of world domination . . . In Risk, many tactics are possible, but the goal is never in doubt: It is nothing less than control of the world’s nation states by any means possible . . . In the end, the most effective way to extend one’s territory is simply to occupy a country and declare it one’s own.

The Will to Power, playfully caricatured in Risk, also underlies Dan Mills Meditations on Empire, an exhibition of five series of works dealing with the seductions of Imperialism. As in Risk, these pernicious geopolitical tendencies are presented with a certain degree of levity, allowing Mills to draw out their consequences to absurd, but logical extremes. Thus for instance the Morphs provide a step by step set of alterations of the map of the United States into objects like military helicopters or assault weapons. In the American Icon series, the images of recent American political leaders associated with the reinvigoration of the imperialist program meld with unflattering popular comic book characters – thus for instance Condoleezza Rice merges with the wicked but sexy Natasha Fatale, George Bush is provided several alter egos including the corporate cheerleader Ronald McDonald and the clueless Alfred E. Newman and of course Dick Cheney fuses with Darth Vader, reportedly a nickname he actually assumes around friends and family. 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. Two final series – Future States Explorations and Future States Paintings come out of a project in which Mills reworked the map of the world to suggest how America might justify the annexation of virtually any country with some kind of resource or geopolitical advantage.

– from Dan Mills – Delusions of Grandeur, an essay by Eleanor Heartney

For more information, visit Dan Mills’ website