Dev Lemons is done chasing love gone sour

Speaking over a video call from a room crowded with odd art and collectibles, Lemons sits before shelves filled with what she affectionately calls “little stuff, little bullshit.” Nearby is an enormous hamburger-shaped rug hanging on the wall, an object she refuses to include among the clutter. “The burger rug gives me so much use every time I look at it,” she insists. “It’s like pure bliss.” Whether intentional or not, the decoration has a menacing counterpart in her video for “eat the pavement”, where Lemons is served a grotesque, googly-eyed hamburger at a garden party populated by animal-headed guests, only to look at it in disgust and bat it away.We’ve come to know Dev Lemons staring out from behind enormous false eyelashes, towering blonde wigs, or clicking through a crudely rendered digital world like an unnervingly self-aware NPC. In her TikTok videos and lyric visualizers, she wanders through uncanny rooms, often falls from an endless sky, or is trapped within interfaces that recall the full-motion video and point-and-click adventure games of the 1990s. Her work reminds me of unearthed footage from cult games such as Harvester or Dark Seed: low-budget, funny and dreamlike,...