Dan Mills – In Times Like these: Chronicle

For much of my career I have used the conceptual space of maps, extensive research, and a painter’s vocabulary, to abstractly visualize information about historic and contemporary topics and events. I combine media including painting, collage, drawing, and printmaking to make works that vary in size from the diminutive dimensions of a children’s atlas page to paintings over twelve feet wide. Rather than using the concise and analytical languages of data visualization and cartography, I explore subjects and information employing a charged and expressive visual vocabulary that is likely to evoke an emotional, visceral, and palpable response.

A series often begins with a question followed by research to learn about topics related to the question. I start looking for answers, and begin making art to discover ways to represent this visually. For example, one series began with recognizing the deep sorrow I felt when thinking about how much war and conflict there is in the world, followed by the realization that I had no idea how much there actually was. I began to research layer upon layer of information on this grim subject, with each discovery leading to more data. I took extensive notes and began exploring ways to visualize this complex subject in notebooks and atlases, and eventually created the large body of work, Current Wars and Conflicts.

For the last several years, my focus has been colonialism. I had questions, and wanted to know more. This subject seems to have always been relevant in human history, perhaps only more so in times like these. After my initial fascination with attempting to tackle this topic, the monumentality of the undertaking began to sink in. In order to make work on the whole of this subject, I would need to research the history of colonialism over many centuries, country by country, globally. I would also need to choose a starting date. The beginning of the 15th century is where I landed. This imprecise but not arbitrary date is between when the word “nation” was beginning to be commonly used (12th/13th centuries), and the period when an international legal system to recognize sovereign states was becoming accepted (mid-17th century).*

For several months, I divided my art time between working on paintings, drawings, and notebooks, and researching colonialism. While the formative stages of art making were going well, I made little progress with the research, and couldn’t continue the art making without the associated information. I needed to set the art making aside and focus intensively on researching the history of colonialism in every country. For close to a year, I read, took notes, and made visual notations. And during the last few months, I developed ways to visualize this information from ideas that were forming during research.

The result is Chronicle (2021–). The central portion of this ongoing series is seven paintings, one of each continent and the surrounding region. In each, countries are painted the predominant nation color of their flag (France is blue, India is orange, and Namibia red). The surrounding waters are painted variants of blue, in a game-board like checkered pattern. Beneath both, the letters and words naming contemporary geographic forms are redacted with thick brushstrokes and dollops of paint, so the land forms are shapes, and waters undulating grids. On top of this, I painted, in chronological order, a line for every colonial action since 1400. Painted in the dominant country’s color, it connects colonizing/controlling and colonized nations. If the colonizing country is on another continent outside of the painting, the line extends its direction. The one exception is Antarctica, which, with no permanent inhabitants or nations, is divided like a pie chart, with color-coded shapes to represent each country with a primary or secondary claim, and dozens of small flag-like rectangles throughout representing minor and unrecognized claimants.

By my count, the average number of colonizing actions per century from the 1400s to the 1900s is close to ninety, with the 16th century the highest with over 125. As these numbers and recent/current events indicate, colonizing, controlling, and taking over another country for land, water, people, resources, and strategic location, continues to be a significant part of human history. And it may be at risk of escalating.