Central Server Works Press is excited to announce our third publication: Isabel Theselius Sycamore Spells, published in association with the artists’ 2023 exhibition with the same title, exhibited at Central Server Works in 2023.

Designed by Síta Valrun, the limited edition hardcover book uses Theselius’s work as a catalyst to explore the time and place during the creation of the works in the exhibition, through ideas of protection, community, motherhood, and spell casting. 

Sycamore Spells centers on two bodies of work, the artist’s X-Flowers painting series, and a series of colored pencil-on fabric drawings of homes engulfed in flames in the Sycamore Grove neighborhood of East Los Angeles where the artists previously resided. The book also features poetry by Síta Valrun in a collaborative photo-collage project featuring images that Theselius took as inspiration and for reference leading to the paintings and drawings in Sycamore Spells.

Excerpts of a previously published text by Theselius are combined with an essay by writer and curator Catherine Taft of The Brick (formally LAXART) to explore the personal origins of Theselius’s paintings and drawing lineage with ideas of the occult and 20th Century Post Impressionist art. 

Limited Edition of 50

Hardcover with gold foil embossing

Designed by Síta Valrun

Exhibition Photography by Casey Orozco

Published by Central Server Works Press

Printed in Los Angeles by El Sereno Graphics