New York-based artist Jeremy Couillard began his career as a high-school Spanish teacher, but outside the classroom he would spend hours creating intricate comics and ink drawings. Eventually, he joined Columbia University’s MFA program to study painting, but soon felt bored. ‘I realized I spent more time in front of a screen than in reality, so conversations about technology became more interesting for me. Even when I was painting, I was mostly looking at a computer,’ says the artist.

So Couillard taught himself to code and began experimenting with animation and Unreal Engine, a 3D computer graphics game engine. Today, he is best known for his surreal video games with absurd narratives, such as Escape from Lavender Island (2023), which takes center stage at his current solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Museum visitors can pull up a bean bag and play the game by assuming the role of Zede Aksis, a green bipedal creature who wakes up in a jail cell only to find that his dream about a dystopian city has become real. Players can then attempt to find a way out of the nightmarish, neon-hued metropolis. Along the way, they follow a love interest, stop to dance, and don masks which can shoot pharmaceuticals at passersby. ‘It’s about being human in a city,’ says Couillard of the Dada-esque game. ‘It’s goofy, but it’s also really bleak. I’m just trying to capture what it’s like to be alive right now.’

The exhibition also features an ominous video installation that pans through Lavender Island’s strange neighborhoods and includes voiceovers of the city’s residents. Nearby, digitally rendered wooden flowers line the floor below a series of colorful paintings of building façades, which appear to have been plucked straight out of the game. A comically oversized, neon-yellow sweatshirt imprinted with the word ‘Depression’ also hangs on the wall.

At the core of the show is a tongue-in-cheek critique of the isolation that technology is creating in society. ‘It’s frustrating, but also funny at the same time that we’re building this new [tech-centric] world that almost nobody wants, but we just keep doing it anyway,’ Couillard says. ‘The game is called Escape from Lavender Island but, in a sense, there’s no escape from our contemporary life. For better or worse, we’re stuck with each other. I think for the better. We just have to learn to get along.’