In 2004 Pastor debuted a life-size line animation of an ideal yet physically impossible bucking bull ride for her solo exhibition The Perfect Ride. The exhibition probed humanity's ability to triumph over nature and visualized the artist's extensive research on structures of movement. These simple drawn stills, which reflect the animation's aesthetic, stem from sketches Pastor made while watching rodeos on television. She has explained that her fascination with these competitions grew from "trying to learn the aesthetic language, or system, that everyone in the rodeo seems instinctively attuned to." Despite their pop-culture subject matter, the drawings have a precise formalism. The crisp, linear images, devoid of shading or modeling, are compressed in a condensed blank space.
Gallery label from Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, April 22, 2009–January 4, 2010.
