"Agrarian" by Zebulun Lund 
  

The Midwest is often characterized as a counterpoint to post-industrial congestion of an endless horizon towards the Great Plains. Today this landscape is defined by a different industrialization moving away from small farms and homesteads. Painters and photographers of the Midwest have suggested that within the triumphalism of toil and conquest over the land there lies seeds of doubt and foreboding. This doubt has come to bear on the buildings that are the subject of Agrarian Ruins 2021. Dilapidated and rotting, they end up corralled by encircling rows of commercial corn. Too broken for use, they hang in limbo with only their fading memories to offer a dwindling defense. This hulk monumentalizes the folly of expansionism and settlement. Agrarian Ruins 2021 presents a bricolage of abandoned forms that gather in the hopes of surviving in numbers with melancholia towards the folk who seem to have rounded on them.