HBAC
Personal Data: What is a Portrait?
On view from September 6 - November 8, 2025
The Huntington Beach Art Center
538 Main Street | Huntington Beach, CA 92648
Opening Reception Saturday, September 6 | 6:30-9 PM
Art For Lunch Thursday, September 29 | 11:30-1:30 PM
Artist Panel Saturday, October 18 | 12 PM
Closing Reception Saturday, November 8 | 1pm
Kendalle Getty, M/other, 2021 - 2024, Multimedia
Kendalle Getty's M/other, a taxidermy Manticore sculpture, will be presented at the Huntington Beach Art Center from September 6 - November 8, 2025. This work is featured in the group exhibition Personal Data: What is a Portrait?, which explores the portrait as a shifting and expansive form -- embracing themes of identity, impermanence, and collective memory.
Getty's sculpture originates from the installation Hostile Home that combines sculpture, video, and audio works to model a psychological experience of domestic space. This work alludes 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. Hostile Home's 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.
Personal Data: What is a Portrait?
Curated by Steve Galindo and inspired by Félix González-Torres’ iconic candy portrait-installations, Personal Data explores portraits across artistic mediums, genres, and materials. As part of this exhibition, portraiture as an expanding medium will highlight its profound impact on contemporary art and explore ancient, indigenous and contemporary manifestations through contemporary materiality.
Dan Faltz shares, “We are wired to recognize a human face within our first few weeks of life. We also tend to attribute human traits to animals, objects, even whole communities - to find empathy, understanding and create order out of complex differences. Personal Data uses artwork to ask us, when observing a portrait, are we looking for glimpses of ourselves or for features from faces familiar to us? Is that reaction a reflex, or genuine curiosity?
Portraits have become increasingly accessible over time – once a symbol of the wealthy, now changes in technology allow us to capture ourselves and others and share instantly.”
