Dan Mills: Human Topographies

Center for Maine Contemporary Art
Rockport

Curated by Bethany Engstrom and Suzette McAvoy
June 29 - October 13, 2019

Dan Mills makes work that is full of observations about historic and current events. He conducts extensive research on topics such as current wars and conflicts, colonialism, and life expectancy by state, and creates paintings and works on paper that visualize data/information on the subjects. Mills frequently uses maps as the space to explore these ideas. He began incorporating maps into his work in the early 1990s while researching the quincentennial of what is euphemistically referred to as The First Encounter. Since then, he has explored history and colonization in painting/ collages on large roll-down school maps and in an atlas of future states, the loss of history through erasure and over-painting on maps, visualized data about current wars and conflicts in world maps, and data about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on U.S. maps.