The Pilgrim's Progress, a series of drawings in ink and graphite by Ben Peterson currently on display at Ratio 3, forms a kind of puzzle. Part of the pleasure of the show is taking an inventory of the objects that appear across the drawings - golf club bags, colored thread, tiny orange flags, strips of turf (often buckled up into little hillocks), articles of Puritan clothing, sections of houses, bits of nautical debris - and figuring out why they've been brought together.

Marry Merry, 2008. Ink and graphite on paper, 22 x 30 inches

There aren't any final answers, but the zones marked out on the pages are a conflation of a colonial historical park and a golf course - or if not a conflation, then an extension of the transatlantic Protestant adventure into the WASPish retreat of the manicured green. The most direct image of this is Marry Merry, where a golf cart, crashed up against a rock marked "1620," lies tethered to a ship's wheel, planted upright in the ground.

All the drawings are delicately rendered, with the frontal passivity of architectural diagrams. Each of the images is framed by wide stretches of negative space - the whiteness seems to spread far beyond the borders of the paper itself, an expansive fog of limbo.

Divot, 2008. Ink and graphite on paper, 40 x 60 inches

One drawing, Divot, shows two trees festooned with all sorts of household detritus, as if deposited among the leaves by the profuse generosity of a hurricane. On closer inspection, the desktops, windowframes, and slabs of siding look less an act of disaster than an act of ornament. It all seems very curated. Lines of yellow thread tag the tree-borne items, and anchor them to the ground in gently sloping arcs. A red velvet rope lies in front of the trees, unhooked from one of its metal posts, like a dead snake deflating in the grass. Surely whoever tied the thread to the objects, and placed the little orange flags that mark sections of the turf, could have hooked the velvet rope back up again, if they'd wanted to.

Was the diorama left as it was to memorialize, or to provide a case for the prosecution? The orange flags in their clusters start to suggest the bright plastic cups that appear, like sudden mushrooms, at crime scenes - to mark the position of spent bullet-cases. It becomes impossible to tell whether the markings are reverential or forensic. The remove at which we're kept - is it historical, or evidentiary? Is the negative space composed of nostalgia, or is it simply the fastidious interregnum marked off by police tape?

City On a Hill, 2008. Ink and graphite on paper, 66 x 108 inches

A further disorientation is provided by the fact that the objects have been preserved, but their uses have been misunderstood, or at least appropriated for more current ends. Play Through features what appears to be an interrupted golf game, cantilevered across the wreck of a ship's hull - and then you notice several golf clubs aren't being used for play, but rather as structural elements, holding up a furl of turf. The most imposing drawing, City on a Hill (measuring 66 by 108 inches), depicts a tree-smashed house held aloft by blue scaffolding - an older house clings upside-down to the underbelly of the raised house, like an antique reflection in an imaginary pond - with an array of Puritan costumes posted across the airborne lawn. It's comforting to see the human clothing, with its hint of recent habitation. But after a while they look less like a clothesline and more like a collection of scarecrows.

City On a Hill, 2008 (detail).

There's something strangely calming about the drawings, despite the fact that calamity is one part of their formula. You could call the mood optimistic-apocalyptic, or perhaps bucolic-apocalyptic. They stand like the verdict of a God who is both a stern judge and a subtle ironist.

The Pilgrim's Progress will be on view at Ratio 3 through February 28th.