“It’s a profound and inspiring experience, the way she’s physicalizing relationships to her family and her community in sculptural and architectural form,” says David Kordansky, who met Halsey when she was still an undergrad at CalArts and signed her to his blue-chip roster after seeing her solo show at MOCA and “The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (Prototype Architecture),” which was awarded the $100,000 Mohn Award as the standout work of the Hammer Museum’s “Made In L.A.” biennial last year. And it was from this garage that she propelled her distinctively liquid Afro-futurist dreamscape into some of the top art schools (CalArts, Yale), galleries (David Kordansky, Charlie James, Jeffrey Deitch), institutions (The Studio Museum in Harlem, L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Hammer Museum, Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris) and collections in the international art world. Halsey, now 32, lived in a tiny bedroom built in the back of this cramped L-shaped workspace as a college student. This dream, liquid, black world, and it was just beautiful.dancing underwater and not getting your hair wet.”Īs a dappled smear of March sunshine bleeds through a mountain of storm clouds for the first day in weeks, Halsey sifts through the “archive” she’s assembled over the past decade inside a makeshift studio carved out of a detached garage behind her Grandma Ida’s home in South Central. “Maybe I was quiet and we weren’t talking or I was just open to what he was playing-he always played the same music-but for whatever reason, that day I was ready for ‘Aqua Boogie.’ It was a cartoon. But on that day, despite the car sickness, the song offered some strange epiphanic salve.
“It was a million shortcuts, my father does not take any main boulevards or avenues, he prides himself on being the “Thomas Guide” for Los Angeles-the human map-so driving from LACES or wherever back to South Central was always residential streets my entire life, the grand tour,” says Halsey, who had heard the seven-minute hit single on P-Funk’s seminal 1978 album “Motor Booty Affair” on more than one occasion. one afternoon in 1999 with her father, an accountant and avowed Funkateer, as he cued up Parliament Funkadelic’s “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)” and, as Halsey recalls, “It just changed everything.” About two-thirds of the participating artists - including Philipsz and the Berlin-based Thomas Struth and Saâdane Afif - are former Villa Aurora fellows.In her first year at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES) in Faircrest Heights, Lauren Halsey distinctly remembers driving back home to South Central L.A. iteration features several new and different works, some of which were commissioned. The show debuted in Berlin this fall, and the L.A. “All the Lonely People” marks the 25th anniversary of the Pacific Palisades artist residency Villa Aurora, which is presenting the exhibition. It plays on a four-and-a-half-minute loop, alternately mournful and hopeful.
The Berlin-based artist’s spare, hauntingly beautiful voice - performing a melodic version of a Scottish punk song from the ’80s, “Trees and Flowers” - echoes from within a steel sculptural barrel. The Joshua Tree-based artist’s 2008 piece is called “Wall Sprawl (Next to Las Vegas Bay),” and the busy, repetitive pattern lends a domestic, if somewhat unsettling, vibe to the gallery - lockdown wasn’t all that long ago, and for some viewers, it might conjure being trapped at home, the mind whirring with concerns.Īnother work in the show, Susan Philipsz’s 2021 sound installation, “Hermitage,” punctuates this feeling. The West Hollywood gallery space is wrapped in Andrea Zittel’s wallpaper artwork, a lavish, decorative pattern that, upon closer inspection, is comprised of aerial photographs of remote locations where urban development butts up against the open Mojave Desert. The works - some created years ago during periods of solitude in the artists’ lives, others conceived of recently for the show - explore seclusion within the context of the current pandemic. Unshakable melancholy.Īs we emerge from 2021, a new and powerful exhibition at LAXART - “All the Lonely People” - addresses these existential conditions through painting, sculpture, photography, video and sound art by 10 international artists.
0 kommentar(er)
