How the West was Won (2017)
How the West was Won (A Re-education) debuted at the Sawkille Showroom in Rhinebeck, early October 2017 (see exhibition photos above). The silhouette of Abe Lincoln and cut wood adornments whose imagery draws from a wild west cartoon (guns, skulls, flags), are not the only pieces in Meyer’s recent body of work that employs imagery of the tools of violence, colonization, and oppression, wielded against indigenous people in the United States for the past four centuries, though not all are as opaque. Agricultural tools, settlements, cut logs – all of these images center in the works reflecting on Meyer’s self- re-education about U.S. transgressions against Native Americans, upon which he embarked during protests at Standing Rock. From Jamestown to Wounded Knee to contemporary recognition rights, Meyer has spent his nights ferociously reading anything he can to overcome the historical amnesia of land theft and genocide upon which our country is built and within which he grew up— taking shots at soda cans in rural Pennsylvania.
Meyer’s subtitle, A Re-education, refers to his own grappling and coming to terms with the atrocities committed by white men to “win” the west and the country writ large.
