Central Server Works is excited to announce Sycamore Spells, its first solo exhibition with Swedish artist Isabel Theselius and the artist's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since 2021.

Sycamore Spells furthers Theselius’s engagement with experiences of family, memory, superstition, and mortality. Central to its investigations is a new body of work in two parts, each featuring a series of collaboratively produced drawings and paintings on wood panel and canvas.

(1) In the first set Theselius works oil pastel and colored pencil into floral arrangements on wood panels, canvas, and paper, forming a recurring X in their respective centers. She then asks her son and daughter to introduce marks of his own using her painterly tools. Realistic with a whimsical touch, the resulting compositions contrast the precision and adeptness of the artist’s mark-making techniques with her children's youthful freeplay. Underneath this chiasmatic exercise which compares tempered skill with unencumbered intuition is another that examines the durations mother and child spend together or apart. While Theselius’s flowers are developed over time in the solitude of her studio, her children’s interventions occur during familial time with the artist giving her young collaborators full discretion to alter the work.

(2) The second set of works features photorealistic drawings on silk fabric. The drawings show homes in the Sycamore neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Theselius used to live. Drawn on delicate fabric but overflowing with detail, the silks speak to the artist’s extant drawings of interior space. The drawings on fabric also reveal the event that served as the catalyst of the exhibition. Inspired by a recurring dream, Theselius drew her neighbors’ homes engulfed in flames, hoping to cast a preventative spell over their dwellings and forestall the vision that arrived in her sleep.

In sum, the visual incantations of Sycamore Spells ask that important figures in the artist’s life receive protection. Grounding the wall-mounted X floral works with a return to earth, Theselius culminates her thematic exploration of intimacy, adjacency, and motherly responsibility with a communal seating platform situated under a sewn fabric work. One last implementation of the floral motif, the draping fabric offers sitters in repose the same protective embrace Theselius wishes for neighbors.