Saturday, August 16, 2025 at 6:00 PM to Saturday, September 20, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Central Server Works, Los Angeles
Central Server Works is pleased to present The Most Beautiful House in the World, Isis Hockenos’ first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show opens with a reception on Saturday, August 16 from 6–9pm and features a suite of new paintings that explore the psychic and architectural dimensions of home, grief, memory, and the uneven terrain of domestic life. Myth and whimsy, typical of the artist’s work, is augmented by concretely biographical references. The mirrored figures can be seen as the repetition of memory and nostalgia; childhood’s cutout chains of paper dolls. The architectural details and one domestic interior concern broader ideas of home, stewardship, the human right to safe housing and the absurdity of the capitalist housing system as we know it today. Hockenos paints houses—both literal and symbolic—as vessels of care, containers of ritual, and sites of rupture. These are real places: a Northern California barn, a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco, a fiber-filled house in Marshall. But they also serve as stand-ins: for a mother, a wound, a past life, or a system too broken to reform. “A house will cling to me like an odor,” she writes. “When I think of a person or a place, the first thing that comes to mind is the way sunlight illuminated a landing or the feel of a well patina’d door handle. The smell of damp stone can never exist simply as itself.” - Isis Hockenos There’s a sensuous specificity to her recollections. The ping pong ball suspended from the garage ceiling so her great aunt would know how far to pull in. A grapefruit cut cleanly from its pith. A flagged coatroom. A train set ruined by weather and time, built child-scale around the perimeter of a backyard. These aren’t just memories. They’re structures—subconscious, architectural, metaphoric—each doing the invisible work of shaping the artist’s eye.