In the 1980s, Halley's practice and career developed amid the artistic and intellectual discourse that arose in East Village artist-run galleries like International with Monument, Cash/Newhouse, and Nature Morte. These spaces were a community for artists such as Halley, Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine, Ashley Bickerton, and Richard Prince, who "shared a focus on the role of technology in postmodern society and rejected nature as a touchstone of meaning." (Bob Nickas, Dan Cameron, and the curatorial team Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo were curators and critics associated with this scene.) These artists used irony and pastiche to subvert and comment upon structural issues of the time; they drew from Conceptual Art to create "paintings and sculptures that operated as a set of pictorial signs referencing artists and moments in postwar art history," expanding their boundaries as artists to also encompass the theoretical discourse around the art objects themselves.