Ionel Talpazon UFO Coming--Planet Energies, 1993 UFO pictures in Talpazon's apartment. Copper and brass rocketman construction by Clayton Bailey Warren Pierce Visitors from Home 1996 David Huggins Holding Alien Babies 1991

visions of space and ufos in art at american primitive gallery by Carlo McCormick A recent discovery made headlines on every newspaper in American--"Life on Mars." But it hardly takes science to spark the fascination that the idea of alien life holds upon our collective imagination. The cover of the Sept. 24 edition of Weekly World News claims that an alien, captured by the FBI, has warned us of an impending invasion from space. This latest war of the worlds is scheduled for Nov. 27, which is really a shame since that means that the hordes from outer space will miss this wonderful exhibition of works depicting our neighbors from beyond. The show, at American Primitive Gallery only till Oct. 26, weaves together visionary art and outsider expression to present a multitude of extraterrestrial representations, from personal encounters to cosmic mystical theory. This art thrives in the margins of truth, belief and fantasy, held on the one hand as hidden meaning and post-divine truth obscured by government and media conspiracies, and on the other as the delusional hallucinations of desire and confusion projected onto the unknown. Thus, our relation to these UFO visions is a Rorschach test of faith and fact, a test that emphasizes the generally subjective terms of most of our discourse. That said, we of course had our favorites. Among the most singularly obsessive is Ionel Talpazon, a 51-year-old Rumanian emigre who has been drawing, painting and sculpting UFOs for almost three decades. Guided in part by his "acceptance by the aliens visiting Earth," his fascination is with the flying saucers themselves, rendered variously in pseudo-scientific schematics incorporating explanatory texts, in scenes where they explore unearthly dreamscapes amidst vortices of energy, or as UFO sculptures ornately embellished with paint. Particularly disturbing were the paintings of David Huggins, whose experiences with alien contact date back to his youth in Georgia and apparently continue to the present day in New York, where Huggins has lived since he was 19. As in the case of "buried memories," Huggins only began recovering his blocked memories of alien contact in 1988. As his narrative paintings relate, he now remembers having sex with aliens, spawning a whole legion of offspring, visiting them in their nurseries and discovering his unexplained healing power when he touched one of his sick children. Other standouts include Stephen Powers' architectural models, Paul Laffoley's transpersonal visionary cosmologies and the comic, quirkily idiosyncratic whimsy of Jim Bauer's robotic assemblages. American Primitive Gallery, 594 Broadway, #205, NYC, NY 10012, Sept. 12-Oct. 26, 1996. CARLO McCORMICK is associate editor of Paper.