It was an honour to produce the limited edition on the occasion of emanjendat at Serpentine South, LA-based artist Lauren Halsey’s first UK exhibition.
Lauren Halsey’s solo exhibition, emanjendat at Serpentine South has transformed the gallery into a Funk Garden that pays homage to her hometown of South Central Los Angeles. The exhibition responds to Serpentine’s location in Kensington Gardens by extending the park into the galleries, reflecting South Central’s lack of public green spaces and improvisational backyard culture.
Her regular wanderings through her neighbourhood, in which she documents the changing streetscape, are accompanied by a gathering of objects, posters, flyers, commercial signs, slogans and tags that celebrate local businesses and the communities’ activism which she adds to her studio archive.
— Serpentine
Images and motifs from the collaged walls of the exhibitions explode off the wall and into the limited edition we produced for the occasion, Untitled, 2024. Halsey first began creating digital collages while studying architecture and printmaking and has continued to develop this facet of her practice across two and three dimensions to create “blueprints for imagining new futures… citing the visual and sonic layering associated with Funk music as an ongoing source of inspiration.” (Serpentine, 2024).
As an exercise, I really enjoy collage. I get to build the worlds I wish I lived in. I collapse all of these worlds: street, pyramid, gorgeous nature, and domestic worlds into one composition to create new opportunities that are about uplifting and about togetherness.
— Lauren Halsey, 2023
The edition was printed in our digital suite on a glossy Hahnemühle stock, which provided an inky depth to the dark tones of the artwork and plays with the prismatic and reflective materials used in emajendat. Untitled, 2024 is available to buy online and in-store at Serpentine South.
