
Art is what happens when such dreams are reworked into visions of the past, present and future, times that Einstein opined exist all at once. In Standard American XXIV, a vintage American vision of "progress" appears as a fraught nirvana of cowboys, flappers and Pullman cars surrounding a bulls eye target graced bye a bluebird of happiness and guarded by WWII aircraft among other whimsical omens of a happy hereafter. A Wisper, a Handshake, a Drop of Blood features a gathering of similarly dressed corporate stalwarts posing for posterity flanked by anatomy charts and tombstones. To the victors go the spoils and if the price is paid by others, so much the better, their expressions seem to say. Hunters, Hazards and Haints reads like a fever dream from the mind of Mark Twain, a fractured fairytale of Conestoga wagons, cowboys, railroads and Indian chiefs, and a lone home on the range where the deer and the antelope play--along with hucksters, hunters, snake oil salesmen and preachers, what Pajon calls "the 'lesser' folk of our collective American history," characters who, like the cowboy riding into the sunset, "should be allowed the luxury of myth." ~D. Eric Bookhardt
O Bury Me Not: Mixed-Media Drawing Collages by Michael Pajon, through May 28, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, 400A Julia St., 522-5471. Left: They Fractured His Arm But Not His Spirit