At first glance, Mary Lydecker’s colorful, kitsch postcards are seemingly innocuous, but look again and you’ll peer upon her world of dystopian leisure trips. Her collages conjoin dated postcards to create strip-malls in national parks, yachts below hydroelectric dams, sun-kissed beaches fed by glaciers and promenades overlooking oil refineries.

“The postcard form has an inherent ‘honesty’ as a cultural artifact,” says Lydecker. “We still approach them as familiar and benign images, which provides a very powerful format for disrupting expectations.”

Based in Brooklyn with an MFA in Landscape Architecture, Lydecker is an artist who focuses on land and resource management in much of her work. Her mash-ups reflect in some ways our own built environments.

“The way that we manage our resources is often ad hoc; the rush to take advantage of a natural resource or develop an available parcel inhibits overall planning efforts, leaving us with a diverse patchwork of landscapes and spatial relationships,” she says.

[Paradise Lost: Twisted Postcards from Dystopic Vacations @ Raw File]

(Source: Wired)