emajendat is, like much of Lauren Halsey’s work, a love letter to the neighborhood of South Central in Los Angeles, where she was born and still lives; it was there, too, that she started making collages, on the walls of her childhood bedroom. This portfolio juxtaposes cell phone snapshots of local shops and street vendors—a “dreamy, maximalist sign” for a strip mall, a storefront painted with a sunset-esque gradient—with digital collages filled with human figures, billboards and murals, beaches, palm trees, celestial pyramids. Each collage takes imagery from a different corner of  South Central—west, east, north, and south—“conflated,” Halsey explained in an email, with “proposals for an afrofuture.” They incorporate clippings from sixties and seventies issues of Ebony, Jet, and Muhammad Speaks, among other seminal Black publications; computer-generated assets from the 3-D software suite Cinema 4D; and photographs of family and friends “posing, partying, pondering, walking, riding a pony, sitting on the porch, etc.” Some, Halsey wrote, are “pre smartphone era”: “i’d take cousins’ digital cameras they’d take w/ them to the club/events/sunday funday and dump the photos on my laptop.”

 —AG

All images courtesy of Lauren Halsey and David Kordansky Gallery.