REVIEW 'Tha surge n splurge': Lauren Halsey's kaleidoscopic spaces
In emajendat at Serpentine South Gallery, the LA artist recreates a funkadelic slice of the South Central everyday
My second review, published in tandem with .
Since mid-October, the LA artist Lauren Halsey has invested the Serpentine South Gallery, in Hyde Park with a world of objects, sculptures, moving image and sound. She has walls covered in CD wallpaper and floors with glass-vitrine and zebra-print carpet. She’s put fake plants in the corners, giant bejewelled hands on the walls and positioned sharp mirrored shapes just so, amid a landscape of solid cloud.
Made from what looks like painted and varnished polymer clay, these crags and corners provide a backdrop for vignettes, small and large, that denote a vibrant community life being lived. Everywhere, everywhere, there are these incontrovertible proofs: posters, flyers, notes, records, figurines, cutouts, collages, trinkets, phone numbers, discount price tags, listings, store names, mementos, reminders, visiting cards, greetings cards, congratulations, road signs, hair styles, adverts, group pics, headshots, newspaper clippings, stickers, slogans, tags, you see it all, you can’t stop looking, you either know exactly where it all is rooted or you have no idea, but you know without a doubt that it is perfectly, beautifully, belovedly rooted.
I’m a sucker for an accumulation**. Conceptually and visually, assemblages and collections will never not draw me in. I think that’s about busyness and effervescence, real life, basically. A bounty always feels congruent with the every day.
All the more so when it relays details of an actual place and the people who call it home. Even if you’re never been there and can’t read the references from the inside, like any new dialect spoken with feeling, you want to learn it, so you can be in communion/community/communality.
Back in early 2020, Halsey was mid-way through setting up a non-profit called Summaeverythang. She imagined it to be a Afro-futurist*-inspired community centre hosting talks, events, after-school clubs for kids, workshops for local residents. So when Covid shut the world down and getting food difficult, feeding people came naturally to her. She set up a food train for South Central, a $80,000-a-month veg box and hot meals programme funded with proceeds from sales of her work and private donations.
One year later, Halsey was still distributing over 600 boxes a week. They were filled with sunshine and open skies, pineapples, curly kale, tomatoes, all this California produce. “We don’t have to wait for someone to show up in a cape or a suit or whatever and do community work for us,” she said in an interview in June 2021. “We are the community. We can propose our own solutions.”
Halsey recently announced that the actual community centre will finally open its doors in 2026. Before that, she’s set to unveil an outdoor sculpture park titled sister dreamer, lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles, in partnership with the community engagement organisation Los Angeles Nomadic Division and the Mellon Foundation.
What I love about Halsey’s work is the dream being fulfilled, the work actually happening***. Emajendat, imagine that. See here. Come close. Be. Belong. As an artist, she creates these exhilarating, exuberant, kaleidoscopic spaces that aren’t just about community, they are it. And they draw you in and fill you up.
Sometimes they’re doll-sized displays that you project yourself into. Other times they’re immersive installations you don’t want to walk out of — she’s letting you into the dream, she’s making it livable.
Visit the about page on the Summaeverythang website with the sound on, and you’ll be transported into the audience at a live recording of The Impressions (Curtis Mayfield’s starting blocks) playing We’re a Winner. Applause, shouts of appreciation, those impeccable horns, and the bass coming in … In every instance of Halsey’s work, even if the gallery is completely silent, you know her’s is a world with a soundtrack. You can feel the vibe, the energy, you can see the music.
Mostly, you feel like you’re meeting the people — the aunties and uncles, the cousins and nieces and nephews and siblings and best friends and former lovers and those you can’t stand but will always help out if they need it. The people at the keys or behind the drums, sure, but also at the kitchen table and on the stairs out front. The kid with the skateboard and the headphones and the big ideas in her eyes. The friend at the salon whose shoulder you cry on. The guy trying to sell his car. The mother just wanting to get home.
Halsey calls this piece an “immersive funk garden”. Exploring it feels like you’re walking around in that expanse between the ears that putting on a good track on a tight day, right when you need it, can create.
Lauren Halsey: emajendat is at Serpentine South Gallery, London, until 2 March 2025.
World of Echo
Notes
*I’ve spent much of this week reading various foundational texts on Pan-Africanism, Afro-Futurism, Garveyism, Négritude and Quilombismo, for something I’ve written about the forthcoming Project a Black Planet show at the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s the final event in a whole Pan-Africa Across Chicago season.
**In September, as part of the season, the Art Institute unveiled a new mural by the UK's Otolith Group, titled A Massive Concentration of Black Interscalar Energy. This gigantic piece, on view until March 30, 2025, knits together imagery from four decades of Senegalese cinema. “Picture a mural,” the blurb says, “that montages the spaces, bodies, faces, forms, gestures, expressions, geometries, and geographies of the cinematic Sahel imagined and invented by Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty.”
Mambéty, in an episode of Africa is a Country, starts by asking the person filming if their camera working. Then he says, slowly, “to make a movie, it’s simple. You have to close your eyes.”
***I love how the dual meaning in the title of the Project a Black Planet show — how it is both about "projection" (of a film or an imagined future) and "project" (a plan in progress) -- how it suggests a push and pull between idealism and activism. This resonates strongly with Halsey’s practice.
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