17. April 2023
All photographs by John Hill/World-Architects
Artist Lauren Halsey's the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) is a monumental installation that combines motifs from South Central Los Angeles, ancient Egypt and other places, both real and imagined.
This year's commission for The Met's annual rooftop installation opens tomorrow, April 18, and runs until October 22. World-Architects got a peek this morning, a day early, when fog blanketed the city; while the weather seemed unfortunate at first, it was befitting the muted palette of the artwork, a counter to many of Halsey's colorful installations.
The 22-foot-tall cube-like structure, accompanied by four columns and four sphinxes, is covered by 750 glass-fiber-reinforced concrete tiles, each one of them featuring graphic expressions that, in the artist's words, “conflat[e] narratives from contemporary South Central Los Angeles with those evoked in ancient pharaonic architecture.”
Take a tour through the installation below, in photos from this morning's press preview, though a visit to The Met roof garden to experience the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) in person is highly recommended.
While the sphinxes are modeled on Egyptian examples in The Met's collection, their faces are portraits of important figures in South Central LA, where Halsey was born and works; this one depicts her mother, Glenda.
The portraits of family members and community figures extends to the free-standing columns that were also modeled on objects in The Met's collection.
In the words of The Met's director, Max Hollein, “Halsey channels The Met's unparalleled Egyptian Art collections through the lens of Afrofuturism, while also creating a powerful form of documentation of her neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles.”
While many of the expressions are highly personal and local to Halsey's South Central community, elements like the Watts Towers, seen on the column in the foreground, are more widely known.
Although the sphinxes and columns, especially as seen at top, lend the installation a bilateral symmetry, the two corner entries to the central space give the artwork a distinct diagonal flow that runs counter to the symmetry.
The walls inside the central space are loaded with figural and textual illustrations from various sources, seemingly inscribed into the concrete tiles.
A close-up of one wall inside shows a complex collage of words, cars, people, Egyptian pyramids, the Watts Towers by Simon Rodia, and Superstudio's The Continuous Monument.
The central space is capped by more GFRC tiles but also has a square opening that belies the monumentality of the structure, helps to illuminate the wall panels below, and recalls contemporary artworks like James Turrell's Skyspaces.
