Lauren Halsey

"Lauren Halsey, based in South Central Los Angeles, where her family has lived for generations, centers the Black community, both aesthetically and materially, in her immersive structures, sculptures, and maximalist collages. She gathers icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience from local vernacular sources such as flyers, murals, signs, and tags-recontextualizing and reinterpreting them for her utopic fantasies of the city. Both celebrating Black cultural expressions and archiving them, her work offers a form of creative resistance to the encroaching forces of gentrification. In addition to the signs and symbols of contemporary South Central, Halsey employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as a means of reclaiming lost legacies, drawing inspiration from Afrofuturist aesthetics of funk music and the utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio. Combining found, fabricated, and handmade objects, her work maintains a sense of civic urgency and free-flowing imagination, reflecting the lives of the people and places around her and addressing the crucial issues confronting people of color, queer populations, and the working class. Critiques of gentrification and disenfranchisement accompany real-world proposals and celebration of on-the-ground aesthetics. Inspired by Afrofuturism, Egyptology, funk, and the signs and symbols that populate her local environments, Halsey creates a visionary form of culture that is at once radical and collaborative"--