Lauren Halsey - emajendat

Inspired by the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood that the artist and her family have lived in for generations, Halsey's expansive practice teems with the signs and symbols that populate that urban landscape and celebrates the community's vitality and a creative form of resistance to advancing gentrification and the threat of erasure.

The artist's important work centers the on Black community, both aesthetically and materially. Halsey gathers icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience from local vernacular sources recontextualizing and reinterpreting them for her utopic fantasies of the city. Both celebrating Black cultural expressions and archiving them, her workwhich includes wall works, massive multiroom installations, and immersive outdoor environmentsis a potent reminder of the importance of community and home.

Beyond the signs and symbols of contemporary South Central, Halsey employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as a means to reclaim lost legacies, drawing inspiration from Afrofuturisma transcultural movement blending science fiction with aspects of Black art and cultureand the utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio.

In this catalogue accompanying a major exhibition at the Serpentine, London, a range of contributors, including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Bettina Korek, Dr. LeRonn P. Brooks, Harmony Holiday, Will Alexander, Douglas Kearney, and George Clinton, consider the artist's wide-ranging influences.