In the fleeting span of three days during L.A.’s Frieze Art Week, Kendalle Getty’s latest exhibit Mirror of Influence unfolded within the intimate confines of a Los Angeles villa. Her latest body of work merges an eclectic mix of materials and forms: figurative sculptures cast from candle wax, ornate mirrors etched with pop lyrics, and crystal-encrusted chairs that echo the principles of hostile architecture. The artist frequently works between poetry, sculpture, and music, reworking pop iconography through a feminist lens, often using herself as subject.

As the daughter of philanthropist and composer Gordon Getty, Kendalle has established a distinct creative practice that stands apart from her family’s legacy. In 1999, Cynthia Beck, mother to Kendalle and her sisters, sought to establish her daughters as legal Getty descendants—a moment that forever intertwined their lives with the public gaze. Back then, she rebelled against her family’s history. Today, she embraces it. Allowing art to become a space of catharsis, the artist finds a way to reconcile the complexity of first discovering her Getty namesake as an 11 year-old-child. In Mirror of Influence, Kendalle turns this gaze inward, exploring the tension between the private self and its public projection. Reflecting on this interior/exterior dichotomy, she shares “I hope the viewer will simultaneously identify with and against me—the “other” becomes part of the self.”

The passage of time is a vital element in the show. I’m captivated by the performative transformation of Kendalle’s wax sculptures, molded in her likeness: as the artist lights the sculpture’s candle wicks, the flames slowly dissolve her image away. The spectacle is unsettling, like a scene from a body-horror movie or a tragic act of self-immolation. She further foregrounds time, designing a mirror as a clock and another, shaped like a tombstone. In each case, these sculptural works reflect on the aging body and its mortality.

Many of her works immerse us in the quiet, often unspoken struggle of toxic, internalized ageism towards women, perpetuated by predatory societal norms that celebrate youth and fetishize adolescent women. Driven by an urgent desire to express her angst as an aging woman living with a connective tissue disorder in the appearance-obsessed culture of Los Angeles, Kendalle created this body of work in a short time span with the help of special effects makeup artists. In her work, the body becomes both a site of struggle and defiance, shaped by one’s health, age, and the weight of a society that demands conformity. She explains, “the body is a battleground both internally and externally in a world fueled with pop-agenda and misogyny.”

For Document, Kendalle and I met on a bicoastal Zoom call–from New York and Los Angeles–to chat about her latest work, pop existentialism, and her theoretical interest in Jacques Lacan.

Alessandra Gómez: Congratulations on Mirror of Influence. The show title hints at how we see ourselves versus how others see us, and how those perceptions are shaped by societal expectations. Can you tell me about the concept and explain how you conceived the title?

Kendalle Getty: This exhibition talks about so many converging points of feminist existentialism. I wrote Mirror of Influence at the top of my manifesto when I was writing about it. Writing is one of my first loves, and it’s something that I feel I’m very good at. When I’m feeling stuck, I just let things go by writing about it. It was originally just a pun: sphere of influence, mirror of influence. After I submitted that, my team thought that that was the name of the show, and now two days later I was like, “Oh my God, I could have called it existential pop!” That would’ve been more me. By the way, have you read Lacan?

Alessandra: I haven’t reread Lacan’s work in a long time but his work inspires you, yeah?

Kendalle: Hell yeah. Lacan has this series of writings about what he calls the mirror stage, and he says that when we’re about six months old, we look in the mirror and have what is referred to the Aha-Erlebnis or this moment of connection with our reflections where we recognize, “Hey, that’s me.” From that moment on, we begin to develop an Imago, which in his writings is like the manifest destiny of who we want to be. As we grow up, we spend our lives identifying with or against external stimuli, and that’s how we build our sense of self. I thought about being four years old and thinking one day, I’d be this beautiful brunette in a red convertible with a leopard print beret. Over time, as I encountered more and more external stimuli, that vision has changed. Now, I’ve aged past any Imago I once had for myself.

Now, I’m having to rewrite that as I age. And on top of that, I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to create some mirrored pieces in which the viewer has to simultaneously identify with and against external stimuli?” There are the mirrors that involve phrases from pop culture and others that I’ve made that are family crests that I designed. I found out I was a Getty through the news when I was about 11, and it was a complete moment of objection for me. I didn’t identify with myself. I went full punk rock and then full goth and just rejected everything and stood in staunch opposition to these projected identities. As I’ve grown older and come to terms with it, I learned a lot about myself, including that I’m inherently a part of pop culture, which is something I’ve never particularly aligned myself with. That’s why I have that one mirror piece with the “Kendall Getty” gas station.

Alessandra: I did a little back-end research and learned that Getty Oil was sold to Texaco in 1984, and the gas stations themselves were defunct by 2012. At first, I assumed Kendall Motor Oil, displayed prominently on the gas station canopy, was tied to Getty Oil, but it’s not. The way you’ve collaged your first and last name on top of each other is brilliant.

Kendalle: I didn’t do that. The gas station did that. The gas station didn’t know I existed, but they were selling Kendall Lube at this Getty gas station, so that’s exactly how the sign looked. That’s the full image. Is that wild or what?

Alessandra: That is wild. There’s wry humor within pieces like this, where you engage with the Getty family brand/legacy while asserting your individuality.

Kendalle: Yes. Especially when I first saw that I was still very much in the closet, so to speak, about being a Getty, and it felt like such an affront. And my boyfriend at the time was really laughing about it, and it was only this past year pretty much that I was, like, actually, that is funny. My mom and dad were never married, so I didn’t have his last name until I was 13, and it was a real shock to me. My whole identity around my name has been quite a journey. I am reclaiming my own space and experimenting with not just me feeling alien and yet identifying with the signifiers of being a Getty, but other people having that alien experience. Maybe we can all be united for a moment in this way.

Alessandra: The Coveted Watermark (2025), feels like an extension of what you just described. When viewers gaze into the mirror, their reflection meets the Getty Images watermark. For me, this underscores how one’s likeness can be reduced to a mere visual asset as something that can be commodified and mass-distributed. I wondered, what if a photograph of this artwork were to appear on Getty Images?

Kendalle: Wouldn’t it be funny? I just thought that was so cheeky. You mentioned the gaze and of course, Lacan wrote about that too. He talked about how we’re photographed in the light that reflects off an object and how it is therefore looking at us. We have these visual screens in place that prevent us from seeing things that would tear these screens. And these things include objects that are gazing back at us. I always think about that.

Alessandra: I’m curious to hear about the production of the wax figures. Are they self-portraits?

Kendalle: Yes, they’re all different versions of me. There have been a lot of strikes in Hollywood because Hollywood has a serious problem with treating people humanely. This ended up benefiting me because I was able to work with some extremely talented people who haven’t had work in the film world lately. One of them is Jerry Constantine, a top special effects makeup artist in Hollywood, known for working on Heidi Klum’s costumes for years. He’s also highly skilled in ZBrush, and he did a full 3D scan of me. A weird little fact, 3D scanners can’t pick up the color black, so I had to borrow a shirt he had when he scanned me. I happened to be wearing an undershirt that was owned by Robert De Niro, who is about to play one of the kidnappers of my cousin in an upcoming movie I’m not supposed to know about. So that’s just wild synchronicity. We did a 3D scan, then a 3D mold. It was very intense work and full of chemicals that I’d rather not work around again. It was a three or four person job.We started casting them in wax, but I didn’t do it the normal way: I opened up the head and torso mold into two halves.
I pigmented different buckets of wax. I mixed a flesh tone, a white one, and a black one, and I painted the outermost layers of the mold like that. Once they cooled, we had to find a way to seamlessly attach it, which is hard because as wax cures, there’s a lot of shrinkage. Once we put it together, I filled it with red wax so that when the candles burn, they bleed. And this pose that the candle is in, this is the pose that women do when they’re looking in the mirror thinking about a facelift and whatnot.

Alessandra: I recognized that gesture immediately, tugging at the skin around your eyes, like you’re trying to imagine a younger version of yourself. The ideas that you’re exploring remind me of other feminist artists whose work deals with the aging body like Joan Semmel and Hannah Wilke. They use themselves as subjects, just as you do.

Kendalle: I wanted it to talk about aging, not just as a woman in a pop society and a woman who is thrust in whatever way into the public eye in pop society. I have a chronic and often degenerative connective tissue disorder called Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. And my body is—well, I don’t want to say coming apart, but it’s disintegrating faster than other bodies, which is really scary. That’s why my self-portraits made of wax have so many wicks in the shoulders and elbows. I would say each candle took 20 to 25 hours and to spend that amount of work on something only to light it on fire and watch it destroy itself, it’s harrowing. It’s a very anti-art world because it’s not particularly marketable and it’s also psychologically terrifying to do to yourself.

Alessandra: Did your wax self-portraits burn all three days?

Kendalle: Yes, decay is an important part of it. It’s sort of like the burning man thing in a way that you build this beautiful thing knowing that it’s going to die. While I was so sad, I toyed with the idea of only burning one of them. I also realized that lighting these candles would change them from an art object to an art subject. That this would give them a narrative and change them from potential energy to literally burning energy. And I still have what’s left of the candles. I didn’t burn them all the way, and I didn’t burn them very long because again, newbie here, I did not expect that much smoke out of the red one. This happened at a pop-up, at an unofficial gallery. I didn’t want to set off fire alarms and create that level of chaos. And then there was another one that was burning pretty quickly and bleeding all over the beautiful white floors. We tried to keep it reasonably messy and not take it too far.

Alessandra: Will you continue to create new pieces as part of this series?

Kendalle: Absolutely. I’m hoping to make so many more of these pieces. I have a couple of other big sculpture pieces in mind that are coming up next. Again, I have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and it turns out I need jaw surgery and that’s happening this summer. That has inspired me to create a whole new series about this part of my health journey. As much as I love body horror movies, I really don’t want to live one, but unfortunately, I do.