My View

#MyView is a mixed-media piece, deeply inspired by the novels Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and The Son by Phillip Meyer. The Son is an epic family saga that traces the violent “settling” of Texas and its evolution from the wild frontier to the oil boom. Blood Meridian, follows an adolescent runaway with a disposition for violence, known as “the kid.” The kid eventually finds work with the Glanton Gang, an historically accurate mercenary operation hired to track, kill and scalp bands of Apache Indians in northern Mexico. Both novels are literary catalogs of brutality; and depict, in often explicit detail, all manner of violence, bloodshed, brutality and cruelty. Going into the project, it was obvious that scalping is a violent act of exploitation. As I examined the act of scalping as violence performed upon one individual, the act began to symbolize essential components present within the larger societal power construct. Essentially, the myriad ways in which modern institutions exploit and forcibly enact power over individuals could be compared to the act of scalping. Furthermore, it could even be argued that these exploitative ways and practices have evolved from small, personal acts of physical violence (i.e. scalping) into more clandestine yet large scale methods of social control. #MyView hopes to show that evolution.