Kyler Zeleny grew up on a farm in Central Alberta, Canada. The farm isolated him, it taught him lessons about the prairie landscape and the importance of a vibrant imagination. As a result, he is left with a propensity towards open spaces, a residue of his upbringing, and megacities, a response to his desire to connect. His work is influenced by a fascination for elements of the past and a pondering for the future. As a result, he rarely lives in the present. He believes one of the highest virtues is not intellect itself but the pursuit of knowledge, whether that is learning how to weld or reading Bourdieu.

Over the last five years, his pursuit of knowledge has taken him onto the back roads of rural Western Canada and the occasional dip into Montana. Sleeping in his car, and showering in lakes and community pools, he occupies his time trying to understand present-day ideas of rurality and how it has been visually represented. This pursuit of understanding the rural consumes him, but that’s ok because he thinks it’s important work.

Out West

“This entire project is then further coloured by an engagement with the occult and is one that is as preoccupied with excavating the past as it is with recoding the present.” 

Out West is a visual travelogue documenting rural communities in the Canadian west. Over a hundred communities of between six and 1,000 inhabitants were documented. The project offers a version of the current state of affairs in the Canadian West, exploring how rural spaces experience an urban-rural time lag. The images conjure up a Vonnegut-like idea of being “unstuck in time”, where objects and the built landscape deceive the viewer as to what period they belong to.

The images in this book are part of a project documenting the built landscape of small rural communities (1,000 inhabitants or less) in the Canadian West. As demographic changes – ‘rural drain, urban claim’ – persist, many would argue that the rural is becoming a redundant sidepiece in a world that is increasingly concerned with the urban. The project investigates how rural communities in the Canadian West landscape struggle to hold onto their heritage despite the diminishing vitality of these towns.

Work from the project has appeared in exhibitions in Canada, The United States, England, Columbia, Austria and Australia. Conference talks as well as radio and television interviews on the work have been conducted in Canada, The United Kingdom and The United States. It has appeared in print in: After-Image Journal, Blackflash Magazine, Aesthetica Magzine, Of The Afternoon, and Ain’t Bad Magazine. In 2014 the project was compiled into a limited edition book in 2014 with the independent publishing house The Velvet Cell.

Bury Me in the Back Forty

From the Dakotas to Alberta, small towns on the prairies are a dime a dozen; peaceful and congenial sleepy towns that can often be substituted for another. Bury Me in the Back Forty is a long-term multi-media project that documents Mundare, Alberta, a seemingly typical rural community. Through photographs, collected objects, community archives, audio recordings, oral histories, drawings and sketches, the idea of a prairie town is performed. Together with these documents, these private objects and souvenirs tangle to tell an intimate story of rurality. The project is both a document, an inquiry, a performance, and a transgression. More importantly, it is simply a story being recorded, recollected, reconfigured and told—a layered portrait of rurality that is both unique and universal. What we are really left with is the stoicism of place, a lived existence, which roars at times and suffers so quietly at others.

This is not a straightforward document, it is meant to excite, awe, confuse, bore and most of all, it is meant to be revisited. The narrative that follows is somewhat of a fugitive storyline, a place where folklore and alchemy mix with the academy to create a collective, albeit paradoxically disjoined, narrative of life on the prairies. The fugitive narrative we are left with is made up of organic components synthetically placed to create a gestalt-like feel of community past and present. A form of community particle collider, forcing narratives together, merging them, grinding them against one another until something collective emerges, something new and indistinguishable from one another—real and imagined. These collisions inhabit an in-betweenness, an imagined community. This in-betweenness is not a place to shy away from, it allows us the opportunity to gleam into a possible future. Like Stonehenge was built in the past, but guiding future solstices, Bury Me is equal parts time machine and time capsule guiding us towards one of the many fates awaiting the rural, marking its constellations, telling us when it is time for growth and more importantly when it is time for dormancy.

This image is one of many from Zeleny’s Out West project, documenting “The built landscape of small rural communities in the Canadian West”(On Landscape Project, 2014). This image is basically split into two halves, which opposes the traditional use of the rule of thirds. However using the rule, it is clear that the road, narrowing into the distance creates a clear division, through the centre of the middle thirds of the photograph. There is also a clever use of line and shape in the image, with the straight yellow lines on the road in the foreground naturally leading the eye up the road. The viewer’s eye is then taken to the horizon at the top of the image, which forms a perfectly straight line. This straight horizon line enhances the contrast between the light blue and grey of the sky, and the rich greens of the fields below. The obvious contrasts in this image, as illustrated by the difference between the road and the fields, could show the stark differences between the rural and urban communities of Canada’s west – in the image we can also see areas in the road where nature has taken back over. By photographing this landscape, Zeleny creates a visual representation of the overdevelopment of rural communities, and how the urbanisation of landscapes is taking over rural communities.

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Link to my ‘Simple and Complex’ project

Kyler Zeleny’s work links to my own project due in a few ways. Firstly, the concept of capturing community and a sense of place is crucial in my work, as I’m documenting my childhood homes/places through landscapes. Also, Zeleny photographs rural areas and landscapes which is a similar subject to my own. This makes it easier for me to formulate ideas on my own compositions, photoshoots and ideas. Another part of Kyler Zeleny’s work that has really inspired me is his use of archival material relating to his own family and surroundings in his project “Bury me in the back forty”. I have used archival material in a lot of my projects for my coursework, but mainly only linked to portraiture. For this project, I want to draw upon my previous projects and the use of this material in Kyler Zeleny’s project, to find new material from family albums and possibly photographic archives to use alongside my landscapes.