LONDON — Lauren Halsey has sent a shock wave of color through Kensington Gardens with a new show at the Serpentine South gallery inspired by her native South Central Los Angeles, and love of funk.
The show is called “Emajendat,” a take on “imagine that,” and features a 3D dreamscape filled with found objects, big white rock structures daubed in neon pink, green and orange, and palm trees large and small made from cutout glass.
The walls are covered in layers of CDs like silvery armadillo scales, while light-up signs scream “Rims ‘N’ Thangs” (for tire and rim repairs); “Shirley’s Natural Hair Kare” (for “kuts, kolors and kurls), and “Vanessa’s Positive Energy” (a dance and exercise club).
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Farther down the twisty trail there’s a massive wall sculpture made from three brown hands with bright, painted fingertips the size of skateboards, taking nail art to new heights.
The scale of this show stretches from supersized — as in those nails — to the miniscule. It includes laughing heads wearing multicolored wigs, plastic flowers and plants that look as if they were dredged from the bottom of an aquarium, and little bespectacled figurines dressed in bell-bottoms and shaking their booties.
The there are the hundreds pictures of the Black community, which began laying down roots in the neighborhood starting at the turn of the last century. South Central was a pre-war jazz hub, but the neighborhood wasn’t only about music. During segregation, locals were opening colleges and trade schools, shops, theaters and other businesses that catered to, and cared for, the community.
Their pictures are everywhere — in color and black and white, cut out from books and album covers, or family snapshots. They’re collaged under the transparent floors in the main room, and dotted along the glassy leaves of the miniature palm trees.
Halsey’s family has lived in South Central for generations, and she’s already founded a community center there called Summaeverythang, which she says is “dedicated to the empowerment and transcendence of Black and Brown folks socio-politically, economically, intellectually and artistically.”
She has also been using her ever-more ambitious installations as prototypes for a future sculpture park in the neighborhood, where kids can play and people can gather.
Halsey just can’t get enough of the neighborhood’s energy, and is always observing, listening and soaking up the mood. She’s a dedicated collector of South Central ephemera, and then uses it to rebuild the neighborhood in her imagination.
“The material culture in South Central is incredibly rich. It’s just to die for. And I’m an avid collector of knickknacks, from figurines to incense to graphic design to clothes. I’m obsessed with whatever people are making with their hands,” the artist said during an interview in London.
“I collect it, and I take it very seriously as a collection, so much so that I hope one day to donate to our version of the Getty in South Central, which is called the [Southern California Library], so that folks on a much larger scale can better understand our magic and our contributions to culture,” she added.
For the installation at the Serpentine, which is located in the green and tranquil expanse of Kensington Gardens, Halsey knew exactly what she wanted to do.
“I wanted to present a garden that was completely in contrast to Kensington Gardens — saturation, kaleidoscopic moments, technicolor and bright. I wanted to just sort of blow out the rooms. In the west gallery, I wanted to leave the windows as transparent as possible to sort of pull people in. And then in the east gallery, there’s this super saturated, kind of trippy window graphic that I also hope will pull people in. It’s a place to sit, ponder and just be,” she said.
Halsey sees the show as place of reflection. “I wanted to present a sanctuary for oneself, one’s community, and pay homage to folks that I find to be important in my community and in my life, dead and alive. For me, personally, it’s a healing space, and I hope to visit [again] in the next couple of months or so for that very reason,” she said.
The show has garnered upbeat reviews, and given viewers a jolt of southern California sunshine in what has been a gray and rainy start to the autumn here. Halsey said she’s happy with her debut.
“I think Blackness is universal, no matter where you are, and to have the opportunity to be in the U.K., and to have my work contextualized in a whole other vernacular, in a whole other world and in front of a [new] audience, is really inspiring. Even though the work is hyper-focused on a specific neighborhood in Los Angeles, people were able to connect, which means it worked,” she said.
The Serpentine’s chief executive officer Bettina Korek and artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist said the installation is one of Halsey’s “most ambitious installations to date” and epitomizes the Serpentine galleries’ mission of “building connections between artists and audiences.”
Dior is the headline sponsor of the show, which comes just a few months after the Judy Chicago retrospective, which the brand supported earlier this year.
