Megalopolis

Daniel Dove (b. 1955)

Megalopolis. 2003.

Oil on canvas.

66 x 96 inches.

The Progressive Corporate Art Collection.

Dove’s Megalopolis imagines the ghostly intersection of transcendental landscape with contemporary sprawl. Hanging misty across the picture plane, telephone poles, interstate signage, cell phone towers, elevated highways, dangling traffic lights and high tension wires all interlace into a constellational composition both terrifying and elegant.  Citing the stillness and impact of 19th century American Luminist landscape painting, Dove’s work finds a pastoral, poetic perspective, even when illustrating the melodrama of infrastructural blight. In a country both increasingly mindful of sustainability, but also simultaneously yearning for the comforts of suburbia mixed with the connectivity of modernity, Dove’s Megalopolis dreams of the intermingling of both desires, most lavishly realized. Verdant with both the grandeur of nature and the trappings of human development, Megalopolis foreshadows a national landscape abuzz, with room enough for all our ambitious American dreams.

Dove received an MFA in painting from the Yale Graduate School of Art. He is a professor of studio art at Cal Poly in Saint Luis Obispo, California.

Grant Johnson ’11

Former Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator