MICHAEL PAJON
The Children of Diana Grow Petulant, 2015
mixed media collage on book covers
20 x 47 inches
[SOLD]
Diana also known be the Greek name Artemis, is a complex divine figure in mythology.
She is the goddess of the hunt, birthing and the moon. These are fitting symbols for the human
life cycle as well as the monthly female cycle in relationship to the body and the cycles of the moon.
The Diana figure at the far right was taken from a book on human sexuality and the reproductive systems.
While most of the information in the book regarding men was very much based in science and fact and
when describing function of the male organ little embellishment was found in the writing. However not only
does the language shift in regards to the female anatomy but the illustrations make all kinds of references to
floralpollination, cycles of the moon and the miracle of life in an almost metaphysical manner.
Diana extends a flow of filigreed blood from her hand, giving her hounds a scent and imbuing them with her
strength. One of her children at the far left ahs gotten ahold of her bow and is making lazy attempts to hit
something/anything with it. Two of her daughters fight over a starling, Diana’s dominion of the wild causing
them to take advantage of their position as her children in a clear abuse of power. It’s a playroom of sorts,
but when the wild is your home you protect it as such. A hunter approaches who may not have paid proper
respects to the goddess, reminders of those who have crossed her hand in the tree
and the overturned skull in the foreground.
MICHAEL PAJON
A Song, A Courtship, A Ritual, 2014
mixed media collage on antique book covers
14 x 28 inches
[SOLD]
A three panel triptych was employed here, and shaping the book covers edges to look like windows of a church or chapel or devotional object. The first panel symbolizes birth, the second life/love, the third death/the beyond. Everything in the first panel teems with life, new beginnings, youth and beauty. The two children rush to the adjacent panel where couples dance and drink and dream. Relationships and tensions of life’s emotions ebb and flow here. No doubt the elusive music of youth fills the air with a kind of sweetness. The final panel, the children re-united, there is sadness, but little fear. Two coins for the boatman’s crossing, candles lit and burial mound decorated. We know nothing but the present and what we glean from the past, the future/unknowable is part of what makes life worth living and what makes our relationship to death so captivating.
MICHAEL PAJON
Asterion Awaits His Offerings, 2014
mixed media collage on antique book covers
16 x 32 inches
He has risen! The sky is a chaotic swirl, clouds roll in and the moon grows large and the land below is in upheaval. Asterion, which also means star, was the true name of the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth on the isle of Crete. He was born of a curse, his mother having copulated with a large mysterious bull that appeared to her. At one time Crete was the center of Greece, but it’s ways were far more superstitious filled with pagan ritual of virgin sacrifice to Asterion compared to the logical center of Athens. In this scene Asterion returns, Kings are overthrown, the curtains to be drawn upon their struggle, as other equally false idols present themselves to our red hooded figure as she navigates the valley in search of answers. Hawks descend to fill themselves on the fatty innards of the once vainglorious and powerful. Some look to the skies for answers, but they lay upon the earth, and as He awaits his offerings the wild grow bolder as the age for logic and reason draws to a close allowing natures beautiful chaotic patterns to reign once more.
MICHAEL PAJON
Roll Again!, There is Blood Upon the Serpent's Road, 2015
mixed media collage on antique book covers
33 x 17 inches
Game boards and gaming interest me greatly as a tool for socialization but also as a reflection of life. Board games are central in building communication skills with your peers as a child, but often come with a strict set of rules. Everyone ends up with their own way about handling the rules, they create house rules as an interpretation of the games actual rules to encourage more casual play, others treat the rules in a much more strict manner. In life however, though there are countless rules as we often find in casual gaming experiences someone always cheats. The playing field is almost often never flat, but a serpentine road that can be at times treacherous to navigate. Along the Serpent’s Road things may appear tempting at times, glossy signage paving each space from the tail to the head offering one any number of things. Along the way a host of characters and game pieces lost, astray, indifferent, and embittered. Some naively cling to the role of the dice they are given instead of making an attempt to skip ahead. They pass once fertile environments being carved up, sold off, mined, pumped and harvested. The noise along the road becomes deafening, making it hard for our players to hear the warnings and read the signs that may lead them astray or take them to victory.
MICHAEL PAJON
Wound Woman: After Gersdorff, 2014
mixed media collage on tin target and antique book covers
20 x 19 inches
The image of the ‘Wound Man’ by Hans von Gersdorff was designed as a way for physicians in the field of battle to identify various types of wounds from melee weaponry. In this interpretation, our central figure is cowgirl, the central image of the tin toy target game that this piece is built upon. The intention of the game was to throw suction cup daggers at this ‘little lady’, a game with inherently violent overtones. She is meant to represent the state of Women’s rights, their right to their own bodies, their rights for equality, and their right to not have to be fearful of the types of domestic violence that occurs on a daily basis in this, the ‘freest of the free’ and the most ‘civilized’, country in the world. In each of her hands she holds pennyroyal, a flower from which an herbal abortive tea can be made. Our heroine is being stabbed, cut, and gored in as many ways as old white men can see fit to keep hacking away at any opportunity for a woman to be on the same standing as him. Still, she glows with intensity despite conquistadors laying claim over her dominion…as the flames of witch trials and the wounds of time and so many martyrs attempt to consume her.
MICHAEL PAJON
Lost in the Gardens of the Wild and Feral, 2014
mixed media collage on antique book covers
27 x 28 inches
The sky is electric in the landscape kind of Mobius strip, part homage to the wilds of City Park in New Orleans part post apocalyptic landscape. A large portion of City Park in New Orleans has been left to the wilds since Hurricane Katrina, and 10 years it has become overgrown and thick with 4ft thistle and swamp grass, a home to hawks, herons, coyotes and the occasional alligator just to name a few. In this scene however it is corals and anemones that have adapted to colonize on the surface, great birds nest in their writhing limbs. Pigs and cats have the amazing ability to return to their more primal and feral nature once they leave the comforts of domesticity. In this scene there are animals, plants and human making this transition. Not everyone is so lucky here, some cling to their ways rather than adapt. The wolves that raise these children will someday be the keepers of this domain.
MICHAEL PAJON
Open Wounds and Open Fire, 2014
mixed media collage on antique chromolitho target
23 x 23 inches
The starling Prince balances on a circus ball wounded and defending his nest from snakes and other intruders. The background for this piece was originally a spinning toy target that lends itself perfectly to the spinning out of control that is happening in this piece. The ghosts of dead rabbits dash around in circles, but even they suffer at the claws and tentacles of predators here. Children play on oblivious to the tumultuous nature of their surroundings. Pistols are drawn as some seek to usurp the prince, while others contemplate tending to the wounded. An offering of peace is being made, but the wings of the dove are being plucked and it is any wonder how anyone in this place will make it out unscathed.
This piece was partially inspired by this poem by William Buster Yeats
describing the disarray of the Starling (Stare’s) Nest.
The Stare's Nest by My Window
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
MICHAEL PAJON
Baptised by the Sea in Flayed Skin and Coral Crown, 2014
mixed media collage on antique book cover
22 x 16 inches
A Prohibition-era St Bartholomew, St Bartholomew was one of the 12 apostles whose martyrdom has been depicted heavily in Catholic iconography. He was flayed alive and his body cast into the sea. Apparently recovered as there are many relics attributed to St Bartholomew that exist throughout Italy. One such miracle attributed to one of these relics is that of a silver statue that weighed many kilos that was almost melted down during the Nazi occupation but survived as being recorded to only weigh grams, St Bartholomew is credited with many other miracles having to do with the weight of objects. Appropriately this depiction places in him the role of prohibition era smuggler, the weight of objects often being the kind of sleight of hand required to move black market goods. He has suffered a similar fate, skinned alive and cast into the sea, but in this depiction the sea is lifting him up a miracle unaccounted for, the returning of St Bartholomew’s body by the sea, the corals and bottom feeders of the sea clinging to him, their virulence feeding off that power.
MICHAEL PAJON
Games of Chance and Occupation, 2014
mixed media collage on antique ledger cover
17.5 x 17.5 inches
The main design element of this piece was borrowed from a handmade Parcheesi board. There are countless beautiful variations on the board design, the only things varying being the color schemes and symbols in the center and quadrants of the game board. It’s 1853, a tough time for our heroine…this board has been modified severely handicapping her movement on the board. This is a time when (though I imagine many did not) women passed the time with menial jobs essentially ‘waiting’ to be married. The eyeteeth, a symbol of wild youth and rebellion in some cultures have been placed upon the board. Choice and pathways are laid out before her, some appearing clear with rewards placed along the path, while others off little more than closed doors and uncertainty.
MICHAEL PAJON
Hands Remember What the Heart Forgets, 2015
mixed media collage on antique book cover
20 x 17 inches
Champagne bubbles and a crescent moon float beyond an open hand pierced thru by a fierce bejeweled dagger. Struck through the lifeline, the hand was taken from an advertisement for a book on palmistry; there are moments that cut through us so deeply that we think we’ll never be the same again. Finding love can be akin to luck and often requires a leap of faith. Thom Yorke wails on Fake Plastic Trees, ‘if I could be who you wanted…all the time’ and Neko Case exclaims on I’m an Animal, ‘I do my best but I’m made of mistakes’. The baggage we all come with can keep us from making connections, and at times we lose sight of what makes us unique as we strive to change ourselves, bending toward that flame. The mistakes, compromises, and connections are worth the scars, for the revelry and fire that makes love so mystical and intriguing is the thing that consumes us, strikes us, and entices us. This piece is for the lovers and hopeless romantics. Their are vines that creep through us deep into the chambers of our hearts to mend what seems to break so easily.
MICHAEL PAJON
A Flash of Teeth a String of Pearls, 2014
mixed media collage on bookcovers
20 x 17 inches
I often have dreams that my teeth are falling out, disintegrating, or are too big for my mouth so they wobble and fall out while I speak. There are many interpretations of these types of dreams, instability in ones life, lack of control, fear of aging. I can certainly attest to experiencing the first two, but the last strikes me as incredibly vain, something that I am most certainly not. These pearly whites say a lot about us, but a chip here and there ads character. We smile at one another as a way of making connections or to appear friendly a bearing of teeth once considered a warning rendered into a greeting by thousand of years of evolution. This glowing gaze stares ever outward, across a compass rose shaped map that never points true north. What it sees is, or appears to see, is a vainglorious scene wherein one of great beauty is offered gifts of poppy and pomegranate, pearls and golden filigree. The two at the top left argue over who shall present their gift. The egg left unprotected has shattered and cracked, so much attention clouding any chance it will go noticed.
MICHAEL PAJON
What Beauty Blooms by Twilight, 2014
mixed media collage on antique book cover
21 x 18 inches
When we pass all that will be left will be dust and bones. This ribcage bursts with life, a reminder of the things we shall become after death. Our cathedral window is flanked by angels of death, grinning down upon a night sky teeming with the glow of long dead stars and the brief lives of mayflies. Space and time are still in this space; flowers open and bloom, finches and songbirds flit and struggle to be released. The dangers of vice and violence linger below, an oriole wonders when do the predators become the prey? A child holds up a manifesto imploring these intruders to leave what life exists here to run its course. A monument still glows, crumbling into the floor…all things of flesh and impermanence returning to the earth.
MICHAEL PAJON
What Creatures of Mirth are We, 2014
mixed media collage on antique book covers
19 x 19 inches
[SOLD]
We all seek pleasure laugher and beauty in life, or whatever we need to make ourselves happy, our thoughts and energies often radiating outward attempting to infect others with joy and spontaneity. This gentleman has had the unlucky privilege of having his head mapped by the age-old process of phrenology. Although now regarded as an obsolete amalgamation of primitive neuroanatomy with moral philosophy, phrenological thinking was influential in 19th-century psychiatry. By mapping certain moral attributes and coupling that with a persons thinking and behavior that a judgment could be made about a persons station in life or perhaps what kind of person they could or could not become. His thoughts burst forth worn upon his face for all to see. An amateur etymologist with a fear of spiders, he keeps a pet rat and feeds birds in the park. He recalls dancers illustrated upon a Greek vase that led him to think of his beloved and the rare flower she gave to him that he failed to care for. As a child his sister stabbed him in the skull with a pair of scissors and the Doctors feared permanent brain damage. He wishes to visit the shore in the summer and dreams of someday visiting a coral reef and watch cormorant’s dive into the ocean in search of fish. He hopes to travel in search of a rare caterpillar said to have barbed stingers strong enough to bring a grown man to his knees. By pluck and luck his mirthful spirit grows.
MICHAEL PAJON
Predator and Play, 2014
mixed media collage on tin target
17 x 17 inches
As humans we go through long periods of helplessness, yet we have evolved to become this apex predator, adapting to defend ourselves and loved ones from the ‘evils’ of the world. Games and game play can be a very important part of childhood development that can teach socialization, coordination, and critical thinking skills. These children appear at home this interspecies play with and among these other predators and scavengers. Smoke rises from the factory, a symbol of the industrialized world that completely uprooted our relationship with our place in the food chain. Perhaps these few will glean something of this experience and grow to be as nimble and flexible as their clawed and pawed playmates.
MICHAEL PAJON
Of Saints and Serpents, 2014
mixed media on antique book cover
19 x 16 inches
This piece is meant to read as a kind of reliquary, the skull of an unknown saint with a golden halo, his/her fate as mysterious as what lies beyond the stars in the heavens. Serpents twist and coil in and out of what remains. Life coiling amongst death, flowers left as offering to those who suffer from life’s many ailments. A flock gathers below amongst the tombstones of the long forgotten, birdsong fills the air like a hymnal despite the fork-tongued devils. A pair of brave and stalwart herons approach to dispatch the serpents infesting the remains of their forgotten saint.
MICHAEL PAJON
A Steady Gaze, and a Matadors Nerve, 2014
mixed media collage on antique book cover
18 x 15 inches
The son of a matador, a nod to Goya's bullfighting series; we observe a man at odds with himself. He enjoys the dreamer’s pursuits of collecting butterflies, identifying constellations, and reading poetry. He would attend his father's bullfights only after much pleading from his friends. He was, however, drawn to the beauty of the women and the various flowers they sold; the simple beauty of a carnation or the thorned and guarded petals of a rose. His life is a juxtaposition of hyper-masculinity and brutality, coupled with a boy’s love for his father and his passion for the beautiful and ephemeral.
MICHAEL PAJON
The Sincerity of Death and Roses, 2014
mixed media collage on antique book covers
19 x 16 inches
This is probably the most straight-forward of the Vanitas series of Palimpsest. The word Vanitas is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity. Common Vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit, or flowers which symbolizes decay like ageing; bubbles, which symbolize the brevity of life and suddenness of death. This piece is flanked by columns to give it the feel of a pagan Greek temple, a field of red as the blood of life. The wings and lightning bolts a symbol of ascension and also power, the strength and beauty that life holds. Many insects teem about, their brief but productive lives spent creating the mesh in the web of life. That we live on through our transference of energy through the act of being broken down and becoming one with the land.
MICHAEL PAJON
Loose Knots, Rope Burn, and a Superior Marquee, 2014
mixed media collage on book cover
17 x 14.5 inches
This portrait of a theater-rigging expert, a job I once occupied but was far from an expert at. In the steady decline from ‘respectable’ theater productions to vaudeville to peep shows, what our hero is most proud of what remains constant, the marquee. It’s gilded glow and chasing lights a spectacle of pure beauty and joy. The riggers life in a decrepit theater has its hazards, a few cracks to the skull from a light swinging free, or a near miss from a sandbag come unknotted. The productions come and go, but it his heart ever remains among the catwalks, ropes and curtains that allow the stagecraft to seamlessly unfold for audience after audience.
MICHAEL PAJON
Warmth and Life, Purl and Flow, 2014
mixed media collage on book cover
18.5 x 15.5 inches
Hippocrates, an ancient Greek physician for which the Hippocratic oath is named after, is believed to be the father of medicine. He wrongly believed that the liver and spleen were the center of the body and that all blood flowed from them into the heart. His poetic descriptions of it’s movement through the arterial system are where the ‘purl and flow’ of the title are borrowed not to mention his unflinching dedication to heal his fellow man. The two central figures are describing the, now standard, image of the pulmonary arterial systems and stand as symbols of my personal support for the equal right to marriage for the LGBTQ community. There is great fanfare and salutation in this piece, as much has changed over the past decade and there is much to celebrate. There are those who will continue to argue that being gay is a ‘choice’ like a pulling a rabbit out of a hat, while others will simply fume and blow smoke until their opinion simply dies out. The Serpent of Eden attempting to cast it’s shadow upon the future, but the heart remains steadfast and its currents run fast and true to the ones we hold most dear.
MICHAEL PAJON
A Beat of the Heart, A Flick of the Tongue, 2014
mixed media collage on antique book cover
18 x 15 inches
I created this piece with the intention of honoring the women in my life. I’ve been lucky to share their love as family, friends, and partners and my respect for them knows no bounds. This amalgamation of incredible women appears at peace though she is beset upon by a den of vipers and its handlers. A vulturous gaze descends upon her, rending her scalp, yet here grace in the face of such pressure becomes unnerving. She wears tattoos upon her skin like armor; each line etched into her skin a scarred link in her chainmail. The term jezebel is taken from Hebrew Book of Kings which tells the story of a princess who was executed for causing the death of an innocent landowner by slandering him. She was known for wearing fine clothing and wearing makeup and the term later became slang for ‘painted ladies’ or prostitutes. I choose to employ it here, our heroine flying it proudly as a banner for all to see, her demeanor echoing ‘bring it’. She is symbolic of the strength, beauty, poise and empathy that all women possess.
MICHAEL PAJON
The Man with the Gilded Face, 2014
mixed media collage on antique book cover
20 x 16.5 inches
Much of the history of modern electric tattooing owes a great debt to sailors and the traveling Circus’s and sideshows that were so popular in their day. Here is a circus relic, face covered in filigree that so lovingly adorns book covers, wrought-iron fences and fine lace. Most likely a performer as well as an artist he grew accustomed to the stares of children and the slack jawed gaze of the public. After all the pageantry of the circus was what drew him to a life on the move, a chance to travel the world. I borrowed certain design elements as nods to the tattoo machines, the fist with bolts of electricity was borrowed from a telegraph emblem…the first machines were actually modified telegraph pens a device that died quickly with the invention of the telephone. If you can glean one piece of advice from this piece, never trust a man with a pinky ring.
MICHAEL PAJON
The Night, Clear as Her Puddled Tears, 2014
mixed media collage on book covers
11 x 19 inches
[SOLD]
MICHAEL PAJON
This Ghostly Dance, So Soon, Shall End, 2014
mixed media collage on antique book covers
11 x 21 inches
Along the Mississippi in New Orleans as spring comes to an end the mayfly descends ushering in summer, their brief existence covering light posts and windows causing everything to appear covered in coarse hairs. A stark contrast to the stars that shine among them…millions of years old and millions of years long dead. Ghosts of other distant worlds shining down upon us nightly, pressed into this mythical valley where great herds roam about as the great pale horse looks down upon them unsure of the intrusion into his space. The synapses that fire in the brain in response to the stimulus of life that surrounds us. The air a connective tissue that grows thick in the twilight where the poppy blooms filling the night air with its sleepy saccharine scent.
JONATHAN FERRARA GALLERY is proud to announce, Palimpsest, an exhibition of new collages by artist MICHAEL PAJON. The exhibition will open on Friday 6 February and run through 28 March, 2015. The gallery will host an artist reception on Saturday 7 March from 6-9pm.
pal·imp·sest (/ˈpælɪmpˌsɛst/) noun ::: something reused or altered that still bears visible traces of its earlier form
This definition speaks to the very nature of collage. A medium composed of found materials, Pajon employs pre-photographic engravings and illustrations from the mid-1800’s through the 1960’s. Collage inspires Pajon to examine source materials in a way that is both critical and transformative. His approach flourishes from his own love of printed matter, an elegant technology, without which most modern innovations and information would not exist; that echoes throughout our daily lives.
- The medical manuals, whose beautifully produced lithography, illustrated the inner workings of thd human body layer by layer like a pop-up book, a novelty now relegated to children’s books.
- The matchbook advertisements that gave one a sense of place/time, often collected as mementos, but also a delivery device for phone numbers and conversation starters.
- The natural history journals filled with gorgeous illustrations, but now rife with scientific inaccuracy and poor knowledge of animal behavior built on the perspectives of dominant theories of the time.
By breaking with the context and repurposing these materials into cautionary fables, Vanitas portraits, scrolling Homeric landscapes and allegorical tales filled with romance and ennui, I hope to create something beautiful out of the imperfect and the antiquated. Inspired by the funerary art and reliquaries of early Catholicism, I create still lives in the fashion of Vanitas, a type of symbolic work of art especially associated with still life painting in the 16th and 17th centuries. The works I fashion can be taken literally as still lives (the materials themselves as both object and former belonging of another human) and also as metaphorically (adhering to much of the symbolism that inhabits much of the Vanitas style reminders of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death).
The toys and children’s books employed show socialization, teach play and explain issues of morality, but they also demonstrate a patently false categorization of life as a series of black and white vignettes. I attempt to uncover the many shades of grey within our lives by coupling game boards, targets and images from children's stories with more realistic (and sometimes ominous) elements, visually and emotionally recomplicating what was once oversimplified.
Because human beings continuously alter the environments they occupy, the images in this body of work (much like the materials involved in creating these images) seek to explore our relationship to ourselves and to our environment. They attempt to reveal the real and imagined fears ingrained in us through the socialization of our childhood, fears that separate us, that fragment an otherwise collective human existence. They attempt to map the constant flow and buildup of our changing selves and our changing environments, borne from that sediment of life, death, and change that, through erosion of time, bridges what was with what is and what will be.
MICHAEL PAJON attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 2003 with a focus in printmaking. Eventually gravitating to the graphic nature of the medium that closely resembled the comics he loved, he worked closely as an assistant/studio manager to renowned artist Tony Fitzpatrick. During this time he started making assemblages of the bits and pieces he had accumulated from alleys, junkshops, and thrift stores, slicing up old children's book covers and rearranging their innards into disjointed tales of Americana.
Pajon's work has been exhibited in various venues worldwide, including the Illinois State Museum (Chicago, IL), Chicago Cultural Center, Prospect 1.5 curated by Dan Cameron (New Orleans, LA), Adam Baumgold Gallery (New York, NY), Nau-haus Art Space (Houston, TX), Mobile Museum of Art (Mobile, AL), Dishman Art Museum (Beaumont, TX), Acadiana Center for the Arts (Lafayette, LA) and JONATHAN FERRARA GALLERY, New Orleans, LA. His work has been shown in numerous art fairs including VOLTA New York, VOLTA10 (Basel, Switzerland), Miami Project, Nova Art Fair Bridge London, Aqua Art Fair (Miami, FL), Next Art Fair, Chicago, IL, Texas Contemporary Art Fair (Houston, TX) and Art Market San Francisco.
Pajon has been featured in Forbes, Installation Magazine, Kolaj Magazine, Basler Zeitung, Where Magazine, Juxtapoz, ArtInfo, Artlyst, New City, Artnet, Artslant, Oxford American, Gambit Weekly, The New Orleans Advocate and Pelican Bomb. Pajon’s work appears in numerous public and private collections including International Collage Center (New York, NY), 21c Museums (Louisville, KY; Cincinnati, OH; Bentonville, AR; Durham, NC), Purchase College, the Francis H. Williams Collection (Wellesley, MA), Megan Koza Young, Thomas Coleman and Michael Wilkinson.
For more information, press or sales inquiries please contact the gallery director Matthew Weldon Showman at 504.522.5471 or email matthew@jonathanferraragallery.com.
