Discussion revolving around Lauren Halsey’s practice is often engrossed in the sheer scale of her installations—temples, columns, pyramids soaring meters high and injected with cacophonous palettes, studded with business signage evoking the artist’s native South Central neighborhood. But these provocations bear meaning beyond shock factor, and Gibb warns against this default impulse to propose considered questions harking back, forth, and through African-American history and artistic tradition. Ancient Egypt, a profound love of funk, and the artist’s fourth-generation ties to the neighborhood and the artist’s ties to the neighborhood serve as progenitorial forces of resistance to channel a new melodious strain of Afrofuturism wherein community-as-ethos is Halsey’s modus operandi. The aesthetic syncopation Halsey generates is multilayered and joyous, propelled by a utopia sprung from reality.