Kayla Witt
Condemned to a Perpetual Jacuzzi...
With Millions of Your Best Friends

Condemned to a Perpetual Jacuzzi… With Millions of Your Best Friends is a multi-media body of work that investigates the personal, the socio-political, and the cultural notions of home. The mind’s vision of home is most often held as an idealized place—the location where meanings and attachments are personal and symbolically intense. Forms of utopian thinking are embedded as the very cornerstone of what the home represents, especially in contemporary media iterations. My work grapples with the lived experience and materiality of the home by redrafting the imagery presented in Interior Design and Architectural magazines. Through collage, painting, performance and video, I subvert the structured and predictable media’s language of desire. At first glance, my work appears “homey”, as the magazine source material is evident, but as details register and accumulate, it becomes apparent that there is a tension between comfort and discomfort in the images. There is disruption and unpredictability in these inaccessible, aspirational spaces. You wouldn’t actually want to live there even though it feels like you might.