HOSTILE HOME

Kendalle Getty’s Hostile Home is a multi-room immersive installation that combines sculpture, video, and audio works to model a psychological experience of domestic space. Conjuring a surreal interior environment, the proposed exhibition complicates assumptions of the home as a safe haven. Transformations of scale and the ephemera of teen angst invite the viewer to revisit childhood and adolescence as part of a broader examination of architectures of alienation. A series of sculptures refashions furniture with abrasive materials and injurious elements disrupting the supportive function of household typologies — for example, a sofa upholstered in sandpaper and a kitchen chair with nails poking up through the seat. Other works make allusions to taxidermy home decor and portraits referencing archetypes from the tarot, together considering the relationship between fantasy and family while ghostly figures rendered through sonic and sculptural interventions suggest the repetitive nature of traumatic memory. Throughout Hostile Home uncanny, grotesque, and abject elements are foundational to interrogating how oppression and aspiration, estrangement and empathy overlap and intermingle in the design language of domestic decor as it’s related to the conventions of nuclear family living. Using subversion and decontextualization, Getty’s work lays bare cultural codes of the home and family, mining personal experience to generate a larger post-structuralist examination of relationality, dislocation, and spatial subjectivity.

Kendalle Getty is an interdisciplinary artist working between New York and Los Angeles. Her domestic-themed artwork is inextricably linked to her personal experience coming of age in her mother’s home. Kendalle Getty grew up under unusual circumstances. She is one of three children of Cynthia Beck and Gordon Getty, a philanthropist and composer whose father was oil magnate J Paul Getty. As Gordon Getty is married with four children to Ann Getty, it became a highly-publicized scandal in 1999 when Beck, Gordon Getty’s long-time mistress, went to court to petition for her three daughters to share the family’s name. Kendalle Getty doesn’t shy away from the complicated narrative she was born into. Her multimedia work is a method of processing the difficult parts of childhood, aiming to generate a cathartic experience for herself and others. Kendalle Getty’s singular experience of hereditary convention offers her a unique vantage point to examine and underscore the strangeness of social codes relating to familial roles and domestic space. Her process of arranging signs and symbols into a new linguistic system grants her mastery over her narrative, one that she is determined to drive forward on her own terms.

Kendalle Getty graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture Education and Human Development with a specialization in video art and sculpture.

—Whitney Mallett

The Golden Child

Multimedia

2022

Photo by Esteban Schimpf

We live in the maw of a hungry, cruel world. Property owners, architects, and engineers alike specifically fill spaces with garish and violent details designed to impede or sabotage the ability to have one’s needs met outside of a home: this is called Hostile Architecture. It divides park benches with armrests to prevent sleep for the homeless. It studs windows with urchin-like spines to maim and scare off pigeons that seek a place to rest their weary wings. It has made the now-criminalized epidemic of homelessness even more debasing, harrowing, and torturous than it already, by its very nature, is. The only place one could hope to evade the hungry, steely jaws of the hostile, post-Industrial, postmodern landscape is in the safety of a home—should one be so lucky.

The Hostile Home is a sculpture-heavy, multimedia installation which sets to explore the ways in which even shelter secured with keys, walls, electricity, and running water can fail us as a safe space to get one’s basic human needs met.

It is an abstract recreation of the very home I was raised in. The objects are grotesque without compromising aesthetic integrity. They mimic objects of function, comfort, and safety, whilst providing none of these things. The space is meant to consume the viewer in opulent hostility where one dare not essay to make oneself comfortable, because these bloodthirsty chairs bite and the food is all rancid. Even blatant boundaries have been perverted into lewd invitations for the entitled, propelled by the male gaze.

—Kendalle Getty