Bury Me in the Back forty by Kyler Zeleny

In the heart of a quaint rural town with just over 900 residents, the project "Bury Me in the Back Forty" weaves a tapestry of local lore and personal history. Utilizing an eclectic mix of mediums—photographs, artifacts, community records, audio recordings, oral histories, and sketches—this initiative paints a rich and nuanced portrait of prairie-town existence. These diverse elements are skillfully juxtaposed against a 1980 community history book, creating a deep, interconnected narrative that captures the essence and complexity of rural life.

This project transcends simple documentation; it is at once an inquiry, a performance, and an act of transgression. It creates a cartographic illusion—a community album that does not shy away from showing the thorns among the roses, highlighting both the virtues and vices that define this intricate place.

More than just a collection of stories, "Bury Me in the Back Forty" is a dynamic narrative in motion—being continuously recorded, recollected, and reimagined. It offers a layered portrayal of rural authenticity that resonates with both uniqueness and universality. The resulting depiction showcases the stoicism inherent in the locale, capturing the oscillation between vibrant vitality and quiet suffering.

The unfolding narrative is a fugitive storyline, blending folklore and alchemy with day-to-day community life, creating a collective yet paradoxically disjointed tale of prairie existence. This process acts as a sort of community particle collider, where narratives collide, merge, and grind against each other, forging something entirely new and indistinguishable—where the real and the imagined coalesce.

These narrative collisions craft a liminal space, conjuring an imagined community that straddles the past and potential futures. "Bury Me in the Back Forty" functions as both a time machine and a time capsule, navigating the viewer through potential futures of rural life, marking its constellations, and uncovering the cyclical nature of growth, dormancy, and demise. This project invites readers to delve into its depths, promising to inspire, confound, and even bore—urging them to return, to discover something new upon each revisit.