The works just exhibited in Los Angeles constitute Lauren Halsey’s recollected spectral metropolis. More a map of ghosts, than an exercise in urban planning. The vivid boxes, like platonic ideas of buildings, can’t be entered. What’s more, many of the businesses commemorated on them are gone now, thus inaccessible. The memorial and the monumental intersect in Halsey’s blocks—as they do on the blocks where  she lives and where some of the businesses Halsey references are “fortified and strong”, while others are shuttered. Domus interviewed her to examine Halsey’s unique L.A. project.

Where does your first solo show at David Kordansky Gallery take its inspiration from, and what kind of narratives lie behind this new body of work? How do you reinterpret, or embody, or deconstruct the built landscape of South Central Los Angeles?
When putting together the exhibition, I was inspired by previous prototype architectures and sculptures I made while in graduate school, as well as at my grandmother's home. I was thinking about reimagining the built-environment of South Central Los Angeles by remixing familial, personal, and more serious archives of neighbourhood here. I reorganized city blocks and SCLA aesthetics by stacking and fragmenting sculptures to propose an ideal street, composition or an ideal poetic. 
I was watching a Blood and Crips Made in America documentary with my partner. In the doc, they were going through all sorts of chronologies of the black LA: looking back to beautiful architectural/neighbourhood markers, community leaders, poetic social-political records, visual archives, etc. They described Central Avenue during the Jazz Age and there was a moment where I recognized my grandmother and her twin in one of the portraits that flashed pretty quick on the screen. I took the image back to a family group text and received a few images of my family and her 6 siblings leisurely hanging out on Central Avenue with Duke Ellington and others. I started to reimagine vernacular images of architecture and conflate it with my lineage beginning with my grandmother, moving towards my mother and father's lifetime in South Central, plus my life experience so far.

What kind of insights or new sparks have the physical gallery spaces at David Kordansky instilled in your work for the exhibition?
This is the first time I've been able to mull over black maximalism specifically with the incorporation of reflective surfaces such as mirrors, iridescent, and prisms. I've been able to create these moments in the installation to catch and slow your gaze to have particular sightlines triple and quadruple the other surfaces. It conflates scale in a way that I think is interesting, creating a really funky layering that I had no idea was possible. I've been interested in exploring this sort of surrealism in my work and this was the first time this has happened.

What kind of experiences and lessons will your recent exhibition at Foundation Louis Vuitton instill into this show?
A lesson I brought over from Foundation Louis Vuitton was the ability to think about architecture that doesn't depend on an architectural infrastructure to hold it up. Creating this installation was the first time I used fiberglass in an intense way, as a way to create these aesthetic structures. It was also a project for me to move away from ephemeral materials in order to work towards structures that perhaps provide permanence.

You studied architecture at El Camino College, and continued to work on architecturally-informed projects at California College of the Arts. How do you think this background changed your perspective on LA and affected your approach to contemporary art projects?
Since El Camino Community College isn’t an architecture school—rather it's an architecture department that works closely with a construction department—the emphasis on the entire program is providing students with the opportunity to build and consider the service of architecture. Typically, practicing architects are not directly involved in the actual construction-building process. But, in my early experience at El Camino, the idea of my projects and my classmate's projects being about built-design as an ethos was instilled early on. I was making blueprints and presenting them to my professors and classmates with the hope and conceit of taking my designs into the construction yard to actually build it. That happened once. It was incredibly empowering to build my proposals for space with my own hands.

Between Afrofuturism and funk, radical and collaborative infrastructures, and your attention to urban communities, how could your artistic statements represent a new language for contemporary art?
I certainly have models for it—including the work and community-building done by George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic, Theaster Gates, and Mark Bradford—but I don't believe I'm creating a new language for contemporary art. For me, it's more about the poetry of collaboration as the most soulful ingredient for everything I make. When I make, it's very important that I think intergenerationally—involving everyone from 4-year-old cousins to my 75-year-old grandmother. This doesn't necessarily mean I'm assigning labour, but rather inviting people to participate. In this way, I hope that my collaborators bring their subjectivities, positions, questions and make decisions that will shift the project. When this happens, the artwork becomes this organism that is all of ours.

In your opinion, how do your indoor built landscapes/environments reflect the transformations LA underwent and is undergoing and its gentrification?
It doesn't reflect a transformation in itself—it's about tragedy, beauty, time and the disappearance of various vernaculars from my neighbourhood. Some of the original businesses and signage—that the works in the David Kordansky Gallery exhibition are based on—don't even exist anymore since the show opened last week! What you see in the show is what's disappeared maybe because of displacement and gentrification, or because someone, likely a business owner, wanted to modernize their sign into a banner or neon sign. I think an important sign in the exhibition to mention is the "1-800-Sell-Your-House," these are call-to-action removal signs so that developers can come in and repurpose our spaces for luxury buildings surrounding new stadiums and trains. I like to install them high up in the exhibition to stay true to how they function in the real world. A friend recently pointed out to me, "these signs are similar to vultures looking down on the neighbourhood, just waiting."

Which LA artists have influenced you the most, and why?
Dominique Moody's nomadic sculptures. Ramsess' gorgeous historical portraits of the black pantheon of everything—jazz, civil right movement, hip hop. Pasacio the King, legendary South Central L.A. sign painter, who has been painting from his two mobile studio trucks for at least 25 years a few blocks from my house. Betye Saar, Sketch, Mark Bradford, who, when I learned about him in community college, made me realize the signs I collected were important.

What kind of signals or messages do fluo-colours signify in your architectural volumes and installations?
South Central L.A., and other neighbourhoods like it, are the only places I've experienced, so far, where I can consume abstract bands of colour in the most dreamful ways ever. My grandmother lives around the corner from a home where the house, the fountain, the hard trinkets, and the sidewalk are all painted a vibrant aqua. There any many examples of this. This affected my imagination as a child, inspiring me to really nail down the technicolour/pastel very saturated colour palette of the exterior of city blocks and the people around me. 
The sign 'Waz Up!' in the exhibition — that was a beautiful sign and statement that felt so good every time I passed it. Then it closed. A lot of these are markers from my childhood that make me fall in love with where I'm from and what I care about. Another example is the 'Slauson Tees' sign in the Kordansky exhibition. Nipsey Hussle transformed that into the Marathon Clothing Store on Slauson Avenue. LA knows how heavy and meaningful that was. I want to pay homage to these neighbourhood markers.

What is one message or aspiration or idea you hope visitors take with them after seeing your show?
Go for your funk.