Lauren Halsey’s first solo exhibition in New York inaugurating our new gallery opens this Friday, May 6 and will be on view through June 11, 2022. Join us for the opening reception on Friday, May 6 from 6 until 8 PM.
In her self-titled exhibition, Halsey tasks herself with matters of time. For Halsey, time is that element that belongs to funk, a modality that presumes land, place, home, sound, and ephemera to be traveling things. Time pressurizes and symbolizes, time instructs and erects, time—within funk—is an emancipatory organism, belonging only to get free.
The exhibition features a series of architectural structures, geological manifestations, and vernaculars (hue, font, images) from South Central Los Angeles, her generational home. The exhibition continues her ever-growing lexicon of engravings, pillars, funkmounds, and box sculptures. Declarations and blessings ("GOD BLESS US!!!" And "WE’LL HOOK YOU UP") appear on neon ombre structures alongside businesses offering to save, adorn, and feed you. Signage from buildings now gone, and proclamations from those that still stand, stack alongside and atop each other forwarding Halsey's sensibility that time itself is a matter of design wherein the past is not merely present but is structuring our HERE and our NOW.
—Essence Harden