The Bowie Knife’s proud hilt and man-killer curve are the signature of its designer Jim Bowie (pronounce BOO-ie), legendary frontiersman of the West and time-honored hero of the Alamo. Jack the Pelican launches its Fall season with Jesse Bercowetz and Matt Bua’s fierce, gung-ho homage. It cantilevers 120 feet through the spine of the gallery and is reputedly sharp enough to cut a tomato.

This masterful wreckage of salvaged debris explodes into a demonic, hoodlum’s opera. The handle is a traffic cop’s Cushman all-weather motor scooter, tricked out with lights, sub woofers, bass shakers, spiked chrome hubcaps, and a Knights of Columbus long-sword hood ornament. The hilt is an old fridge, modified into an iron maiden (that horrific medieval torture device). It opens to a light show and the screaming throb of eight-year-olds (gathered up from the YMCA), singing “Run to Hills. Run for your lives”-the chorus in the team’s blazing rendition of Iron Maiden’s Run to the Hills, which is a history lesson in the genocide of America’s westward expansion. -“White man came across the sea/He brought us pain and misery/We fought him hard, we fought him well/Out on the plains we gave him hell.”

The blade is a scrap tin canoe, in deference to Kon Tiki, popular archeologist Thor Heyerdahl’s do-it-yourselfer of a pre-colonial native American boat that’d take on the Pacific to Polynesia. Its outstretched oars frame portraits of pioneers, revolutionaries and martyrs. Through peepholes and creaky cabinet doors in its sides, one can look onto a model of the Guggenheim Balboa (—“meets pinhead”); a dry ketchup making device with knives, blenders, a garbage disposal unit, tomatoes, walnuts and pumps; a desert of cacti, heat and lizards; dead bonsai; living scorpions; and a video of a knife throwing contest. Emily Lambert sings a passionate (if off-key) cover of The Doors’ love song Indian Summer.

Encrustations of minutiae are everywhere-painted images, words and sculptural elements in the anti-craft tradition-and blaring over it all is their anthem, A Bowie Knife for a Lifer. —“WE’VE GOT THE BRAGGIN RIGHTS” leads the chorus, “THE KNIFE, THE KNIFE, THE KNIFE IS ON FIRE!/FREEZE US IN A BLOCK OF ICE/AND PEE ON THE PYRE’S FIRE.” These and the lyrics of another of the four songs that animate the show were processed into rock-ballad song poems by a bargain songster-for-hire they found on Ebay.