Michael Pajon
The Sky Came Alive with Lightning, While Death Lurked in the Grass A Dagger for the Vermin and a Ribbon for the Heart Animals, Explorers, Aeronauts, and Soldiers of the Five and Dime R. Holylund, Tobacconist, Amateur Naturalist Barker of Gilded Truths, Handler of Rare Lies These Callused Hands That Worked the Land Knots Slip as Birds Cry Warning “Tighten the Screws, and Fear Not the Tigers Oath” False Direction and False Profits Ships Sheer Along Shorelines as Live Oaks Bare Their Bones A Century of Progress The Moon Crouched Low, Casting Pale Shadows Over Dancers, Diggers, and Debris "Lady Lazarus" Roadmap to a Little Graveyard of Hopes Abandoned, Like Beads of Memory, to Locked Doors and Empty Houses. Only The Wind's Home Baby Valentine, Stoic, Even Among Songbirds and Acrobats The Land Crippled, Became Dull and Covered with Dust B.L. Arthur, Aeronaut Buckshot and Riches Stole Promise From His Breath The Arrows Were Sharp, but the Poison Was Gentle A Southern Wind to Breathe and Shine Strong Medicine and a Heroic Moustache Brothers Ghosts and Father's Tea Stained Teeth Liars, Lovers, and Backstabbers Rotted Teeth and the Ghost of General Sherman Standard American XXIV: Ghosts and Suitors All Aboard the Lincoln Highway
Standard American Collages

What I really hope to achieve with these collages is to evoke a sense of place, and to slow the viewer down by giving them an array of information. Offering the viewer a roadmap of an America that seems both imagined and real: a blending of artifact and artificial, past and present.

“Collage making may be the inevitable expression of the democratic experience, of the constantly decomposing and recomposing…” as stated by Jed Perl in New Art City. It is taking something with a history and making into something new. It is reflective of the society that we live in, as the essayist Ralph Ellison well describes the United States as a “collage of a nation”.


Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away and the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget that history puts a saint in every dream.

~Tom Waits
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