President's Showcase
Audrey Lendvay they/them
Supervising Professor: Carrie Ann Baade
Audrey Lendvay is a third-year Bachelor of Fine Arts student concentrating in painting and minoring in Museum Studies. Fascinated by natural and virtual worlds, they use painting to investigate humanity’s relationship with their animal and digital selves in a world in which the environment and technology often feel increasingly at odds yet essential for life. Audrey is a participant in the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program and an active board member in Florida State University’s student led gallery space, Phyllis Straus Gallery. Their work pursues a way of life that is equally in tune with the natural world and the radical social potential that exists in the ethical use of technology, and they expect to graduate in spring 2026 to pursue a career in museum education.
Abstract
Games pervade our lives. In contemporary times, videogames often come to mind as the latest phenomenon of play, and consequently, the latest opportunity for mass commoditization of games. However, the marketplace represents only a shallow perspective of video games, which continue a long history as “sites of resistance” against corporate appropriation of play and for “creative practice, philosophical experimentation, cultural critique, and political action,” as described in 2017’s Metagaming by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux. Players critically manipulate, disregard, and expose rules just as generations of artists have done so with the systems that shape our lives. My research is distinctly concerned with the synthesis of art and games by engaging critically with the “rules'' that inform our lives and with living meaningfully through play.
My body of work begins with adapting artist Guy Debord’s dérive into the virtual landscape of Fallout 4. Here I subverted the game’s rules by using console commands to break and navigate space intuitively. Screen captures from this process became the basis for three paintings. For the second phase, I reflected on each of the selected encounters in the physical spaces I inhabit, conducting new explorations guided by the visual properties of the previous compositions. I synthesized my new images into digital collages. These investigations required me to engage with my surroundings in new and attentive ways, and resulted in a hybrid art practice that revolves around meaningful participation in overlooked virtual and physical spaces and which enriched my understanding of play and mindfulness.
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