something scary something pretty ST UDIO I V “Knoxv ille Menag erie” | SPR IN G 2019 | S c ot t ie McDaniel
“Something Scary Something Pretty” is an ongoing investigation of the landscape of anxiety in the United States of America. This project asserts the Vietnam War as the start of the decline of the American Dream, which followed the progress and prowess afforded by World War II and the Korean War. I argue that the trauma of the Vietnam War has persists through today, albeit in different forms of horror. This project uses TRAUMA as a medium to connect fragmented memories and visualize the connections by appropriating “scary” and “pretty” experiences of the past half-century.
The project draws from representation techniques employed by DADA artists such as Max Ernst. This ambitious project attempts to address expectations, masculinity, beauty, pain, youth, death, and other artifacts of war that persist into peacetime. Ultimately, the author hopes, that this atypical approach to ‘landscape’ yields to a critical examination of the normative practices of landscape architecture.
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