DAZED
Making art – alongside all the deep reading and thinking that inform the conception of her work – is a “coping mechanism” for multidisciplinary artist, Kendalle Getty. “I experienced a lot of gaslighting as a child, it has made my relationship to reality a bit skittish,” she explains, talking over Zoom from the studio on the grounds of her Hollywood mansion. “I’m always curious where the line is between reality and perception, and what inspires me as an artist is externalising these fears. I treat it as somewhere between an exorcism and alchemy. If I can just get it out of me and out there, perhaps I can transmute this shit into gold.” This sense of reckoning with her complicated past – which reads like the plot of a modern classic American novel – is the eminent force permeating her mordant, enthralling artworks.
Please can you begin by introducing us to Hostile Home?
Kendalle Getty: Hostile Home is a conceptual, emotional and somewhat abstract recreation of the home that I grew up in, so it has a lot to do with living in a place where you cannot get your needs met. However, at the same time, I do come from some privilege, so these objects are opulent. They mimic objects that provide comfort however, they don’t provide that.
So they merely signify comfort without embodying it?
Kendalle Getty: That’s right. I’m interested in semiotics. So a big part of this, for me, is disrupting the visual literacy of what a chair is supposed to look like. I believe it was Sartre who said that when you close your eyes and hear the word ‘chair’, you have in your mind a picture of a chair. And theoretically, from the time we were old enough to develop and retain language, we begin to supplant our experiences with images. So, for instance, I’ve created a couple of chairs. They look like chairs, sort of, but they're completely covered in crystals. Looking at them, you know that you couldn’t get your needs met sitting on this chair. It both is and is not a chair.
They were also inspired by Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. I just loved the idea that this woman felt things so deeply that, the moment her heart broke, she stopped all the clocks never changed her clothes again, and let all the food rot on the table. It was inspired by that, but it also has a vibe as though these things have been pulled from the Titanic.
