The Agrarian Ruins

Zebulun Lund’s Thesis drawings “Agrarian Ruins” was accepted for the ACSA exhibition in the DRAWING FOR THE DESIGN IMAGINARY being held at the Carnegie Museum of Art & Carnegie Mellon University. Review of the 225 submissions resulted in an acceptance rate of 15%. The plight of the Midwest is often characterized as a counterpoint to post-industrial congestion of an endless horizon stretching towards the Great Plains. Today this landscape is defined by a different form of industrialization and move away from the distributive pattern of small farms and homesteads. Recognizing this, the painters and photographers of Midwest (Hart Benton, Wood and Adams) have suggested that within the triumphalism of toil and conquest over the land there also lies seeds of doubt and foreboding. Today this doubt has come to bear on a new generation of buildings that are the subject of Zebulun Lund’s drawings “Agrarian Ruins”. Dilapidated and rotting, these buildings end up corralled by encircling rows of commercial corn. Too broken for any use they hang in limbo with only the fading memories of their builders to put up a dwindling defense. Cornered, oafish and ungainly these hulks appear to monumentalize the folly of expansionism and settlement. “Agrarian Ruins” presents a bricolage of abandoned forms that appear to gather together in the hope that they can survive in numbers. They are Frankenstein-like buildings made from parts that are patched together with an aggressive melancholia towards the country-folk who seem to have rounded on them.