Lauren Halsey’s Psychedelic Homage to South Central

View of Lauren Halsey’s exhibition, 2020, at David Kordansky.
Lauren Halsey’s exhibition at David Kordansky, her first at the gallery, took the form of a clamoring, abstracted cityscape: a funk apotheosis of South Central—or, as the city and its real estate developers now brand it, South Los Angeles. Rising from the prismatic silver vinyl that lined the gallery floor was a jumble of towering rectangular boxes hand-painted with the emblems of strip mall storefronts, their t