Lauren Halsey (1987, Los Angeles, USA) is an artist with a distinct visual language deeply rooted in South Central LA, where her family has lived for generations. Through maximalist installations, objects and architectural structures, she archives and remixes the changing signs and symbols that populate her environment.
Lauren Halsey regularly wanders through her neighbourhood, gathering objects and graphic ephemera that celebrates local enterprise and community resistance to successive waves of gentrification. Merging timelines through her interests in iconography connected to African diaspora, black and queer icons, architecture, and the visual sonic layering associated with Funk music – she cites P-Funk as the touchstone for her approach to making and living.
Emajendat is Halsey’s first solo exhibition in the UK, transforming the Serpentine Gallery into a site-specific and immersive “Funk Garden.” At the heart of the exhibition is a walk-in version of her signature vignettes, usually seen in miniature within her “Funkmound” sculptures. The CD clad walls and floors create a prismatic effect, while scaled-up figurines originally collected from swap-meets in and around South Central recreate the backyard culture that thrives despite a lack of green spaces in the city.
“A lot of the inspiration for my mindset comes from claiming the imaginative headspace that I embodied via P-Funk as a pre-teen. I became a hardcore “Funkateer” as a teenager and by adulthood I was dreaming up future possibilities that revolved around community, equity, love, and neighbourhood pride – all things Funk. This is the texture of who I am.”
Halsey’s practice extends into Summaeverythang, a community centre she founded in her neighbourhood in 2019, which is “dedicated to the empowerment and transcendence of Black and Brown folks socio-politically, economically, intellectually, and artistically.” Drawing on the history of grassroots activity in her area, the centre hosts workshops, events, talks and after-school programmes for children. During the global pandemic it was temporarily repurposed as a distribution hub for organic local food boxes.
Herself having gone to school in the next door neighbourhood (Westchester), Halsey was able to be both an insider and outsider as a child. In a place where car culture is everything, she noticed nuances in architectural materiality from an early age; differences such as businesses with bars on windows or bulletproof Plexiglass, versus neighbourhoods where this wasn’t the case. “This materiality shapes how I perceive myself and how I perceive others. I would often wonder – who made the material choice to do this? To communicate that I or my community is dangerous, that we’re a threat, and need to be oppressed and controlled?”
Having enrolled in Architectural classes, Halsey immediately understood the power of space-making. “I had no idea back then what it meant to get something built. I just thought – Oh, if I could create a set of plans and I could create some sort of scenario where I have a team building with me in vacant lots, I could build these dream spaces. But I quickly found out that’s not how the process works… During this time I determined that instead of becoming an architect, I would become an artist.”
“What if I used art to communicate alternate messaging? Most especially concerning the predominant perception of Black and Brown people? And bigger than that, how could I use art to explore and honour the different ways these communities imagine and experience their neighbourhoods, lived histories and physical environments?”
Halsey adopts P-Funkadelic as a medium of seeing, listening, and creating in relation to all the colours and energy that surrounds her. To understand and frame these neighbourhoods in this way, competes against the dominant representations or narratives of these communities as raggedy, suppressed, poor, or of a lower cultural capital.
Her works explore and celebrate alternate lived narratives: “a narrative of South Central LA where you’re on a certain block and you’re existing amongst a palette that’s energetic, inviting and beautiful, where you go inside a shop and people are making and selling these fantastic objects. That’s also a reality experienced by these communities, but it’s rarely depicted in media or art. We’re far more than the problematic narratives and conditions that have been placed upon us, and which we continue to endure.”
Nurturing hyper-aesthetic and psychedelic gardens in which to sit and ponder, Halsey grows aspirational, dreamy, and technicolour landscapes that radiate an abundance of love and joy. Situated within the large green grounds of The Serpentine, she approaches her gallery-based exhibitions and commissions as prototypes for one of her ultimate goals: to create a permanent sculpture park, or series of Funk Gardens in South Central.
“Funk is life. It’s oxygen, water, air. Funk is freedom. It’s my life force. It gives me the conceit, and the attitude, and the energy to reach my level. The level where everything is ‘on the One’, which is what George and Parliament-Funkadelic subscribe to. Once you reach the maximum level of Funkmanship, you’re doing something right. That’s the heartspace that I live with, which gives me the freedom to dream, to transform and to remix. It’s hard to define, because once you define Funk – it’s not Funk anymore… But a Funk opera is happening – I hope people are intrigued and seduced into wanting to decode it, to both sit in it and be of it.”
