L’IDENTIFICATION AVEC L’AUTRE (IDENTIFICATION WITH THE OTHER)

Identity yields profit today: our imagos forever tweaked by the influences of social media, the fashion industry, ever flux beauty standards, and corporate greed. The psychological landscape of self grows more and more hostile as we chisel ourselves into the forms generally accepted, which is to say, generally marketable. As a pathological outsider, I find it more and more confusing to relate both to my true self and to what I can see of the other. How much of my experience of otherhood can we attribute, though, to American culture?

I have long considered myself a cultural bastard; raised without television, I don’t speak this language of pop icons, kitsch fables, and camp onomatopoeia. I don’t culturally belong to the United States the way other Americans do, having spent formative years in both the US and Europe. I also don’t fit in neatly with Europeans. I belong nowhere; which is to say, I belong equally everywhere. This non-belonging grants me a special kind of freedom—at the cost of a special kind of loneliness. I find myself faced with the same hurdle in every language: the need to translate not just words, but concepts, connotations, feelings. Words, spoken, mostly fail me: thus, I must communicate via art and via action.

What does it mean to be a bastard princess? Some compare me to Marie Antoinette and wish me death over rumors and presumptions. Others see me as a poser, unwelcome to subculture and incapable of suffering. Some see the crab meat under my shell of projected identity—and try to boil me alive. So I look for myself everywhere, from the mirrored halls of Versailles to the literal reflections of the other. One who sees my symbols, sigils, and art in their own reflection must identify simultaneously with my art and with themselves. This is why I have created mirrored works that touch on my identity, as well as universal experiences such as love and disappointment (in my Fuckboy toile) and my outsider/insider view of the contemporary American pastoral in a French tradition: my urban sprawl toile. These toiles are etched into arched mirrors à la mirrored hallways of Versailles, in reference to the queen who, as a teenage outsider, was bestowed with the hefty crown in a country that hated her and spread rumors that ultimately led to her much-celebrated murder.

-Kendalle Getty