Jonathan Ferrara Gallery is proud to announce O Bury Me Not, new mixed media collage with hand drawing by Michael Pajon. The exhibition is a follow up to his successful and acclaimed solo installation at VOLTA NY fair in March during Armory week.
Pajon's
latest works will be unveiled on April 23 in conjunction with the New
Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and will remain on view through May
28. There will be an artist's reception Saturday, May 4, from 6-9 pm.
This latest series, O Bury Me Not,
titled after a Depression-era cowboy ballad, will showcase Pajon's
whimsical and narrative collage, meticulously created from hand-cut
materials including antique scrapbooks, book covers, matchbooks,
handwritten letters and ledgers, lithographs, maps, siding samples and
old photographs. All of his materials come from the golden age of
printed matter from the late 1860's to the 1940's, to which the artist
adds his own hand-drawing in order to connect a new narrative from the
elements of nostalgia.
Pajon says of these works:
Death
is a prevalent theme in this body of work, it is something that has
shaped my life significantly, and the lives of those portrayed
eternally. Amongst them are dentists, salesmen, hucksters, hunters,
school children, snake oil salesmen, and preachers -- the 'lesser' folk
of our collective American history. They, like the dying cowboy, should
be allowed the luxury of myth.
For
it is in this myth-making that truths can be found, and it is in death
that we return to the earth, the final truest act we will make. These
collages are the headstones of the forgotten and the discarded,
reliquaries, suspending that notion of death and the unknown, replacing
it with myth and story, scrolling narratives of American fable and
folly, painted in torn ticket stubs and moth eaten medical manuals.
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, Chicago, IL;
Prospect 1.5 (curated by Dan Cameron), New Orleans, LA; Adam Baumgold
Gallery, New York, NY; Nau-haus Art Space, Houston, TX, and Jonathan
Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans, LA. His work has been shown in numerous
art fairs including Nova Art Fair (Chicago, 2006), Bridge London
(London, 2007), Aqua Art Fair (Miami, 2007), Next Art Fair (Chicago,
2008), the Texas Contemporary Art Fair (Houston, 2012), and VOLTA New
York (2013).
His work has been reviewed in
Forbes, Where Magazine, Juxtapoz, ArtInfo, Artlyst, Gambit Weekly, New
City, Artnet, Artslant, and Pelican Bomb. His works appear in numerous
public and private collections including 21c Museum, Louisville, KY; the
Francis H. Williams Collection in Wellesley, MA; Megan Koza Young of
the Dishman Art Museum, Beaumont, TX; as well as prominent New Orleans
collectors Thomas Coleman and Michael Wilkinson.
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