Audrey Lendvay
College of Fine Arts, Studio Art (BFA)
Setstage_03
In my practice, landscape and machine are inseparable systems, each defined by finite resources and limited capacity to absorb human intervention. I work at the threshold where natural environments and digital infrastructures mirror one another, revealing how both are destabilized by use. Through paintings, sculptures, and installation, I draw conceptually from the logic of collision in video games, the invisible programming that prevents players from passing through objects and sustains immersion. Collision is essential yet unseen until it fails, and I use it as a framework for abstraction and for understanding environmental thresholds, points where systems appear stable until stress exposes their limits.
The virtual world often gives shape to truths that go unnoticed in the physical world, and in my artwork, I explore the visual language of system error using the wastelands of the game Fallout 4 to initiate conversations about environmental degradation and about living as animals in the digital age. Just as the speculative future of the Fallout franchise maps intricate game worlds over the nuclear ruins of American cities, my practice attempts to realize the ways in which our species has altered and glitched the natural geometry of the Florida landscape.
My process moves deliberately between digital and analog modes to produce hybrid digital-physical objects, material analogues for real world glitches within environmental systems that often go unnoticed until collapse becomes unavoidable. In addition, my process investigates the way video game players critically manipulate, disregard, and expose rules just as generations of artists have done so with the systems that shape our lives. My work is informed by performance art traditions and by imagery found during virtual world explorations. Splintered ecosystems with glowing colors, flattened dimensions, and out-of-bounds perspectives reflect a failing simulation and a longing for reconnection with the Earth. I work from a place of love for both digital artforms and wildlife, and a desire for a way of life in which technology and the environment can sustainably cooperate in a world that feels increasingly at odds with itself.
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