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. The exhibition is anchored by the series House Paintings, three large frontal compositions depicting homes of deep emotional significance to the artist. In #1, we find a reclusive barn with feral cats and corrugated aluminum. In #2, clear bathwater, mortadella, morning cartoons, and a closet of identical Levi’s. #3, rooted in the Marshall house, holds ravens, guano, wind, and the smell of wool. Each home is inhabited by twin figures—mirrored, symmetrical forms that call to mind paper dolls, spirit guides, or the recursive gaze of memory itself. “Symmetry of body, symmetry of memory. They reflect us reflecting ourselves. To look at a house is to ask what you’ve carried away from it—and what it still carries of you.” —Isis Hockenos If these paintings build the psychic spine of the show, the surrounding works act as poetic offshoots. Fenced (Naked Ladies) transforms Northern California flora into goblinlike blossoms. Elflock stages four vaguely female figures lunging outward, bound together by a thick braid of hair—part folkloric talisman, part invisible tether. Their expressions are unaware. The tension lies not only in the composition but in the ambiguity: is this enchantment or entrapment? In God is My Co-Signer, four bearded figures dance absurdly in front of a Victorian facade—divine, cartoonish, pajama-clad. Above the roofline rise five eggplant colored orbs, like strange moons from another galaxy, pentasected by black and red triangles, reminiscent of the motif on a harlequin’s dress and the shape of hat. The figures have the bearded appearance of storybook gods of the western canon, but they almost seem to be in costume, the hairlines a little too tidy, the beards a little too much like sheep's wool or shaggy moss. The artist seems to be laughing wryly at the preposterous nature of housing access in her country today. Zeus has no credit score. In A Man Sits Alone at a Table, a man sits inert at a table draped in signs of material success—candelabras, a palm, gilt. He is surrounded by abundance and stuck inside it, unable to act. The painting is a meditation on masculinity and architecture, on success as stasis. Throughout the show, the act of painting aligns with other modes of making: cooking, dressing, arranging objects on a window sill. For Hockenos, to paint is to create a stage on which ritual, absurdity, sacredness, and grief all unfold. “It began with a doll’s house. Five feet tall, built for my grandmother when she was a girl. I spent years arranging and rearranging its scenes—domesticity, celebration, scandal, and ritual. Only last month, I found myself beating the tiny rugs and airing out the tiny pillows.” —Isis Hockenos That impulse—to construct and deconstruct space as a way of processing time—runs throughout the work. A house is never just wood and paint—it is atmosphere, inheritance, projection. “I feel profoundly the privilege of these domiciliary parameters. To be housed is a human right. Systemic unhousing is the erasure of imagination. And without imagination, you can’t dream of a tomorrow.” —Isis Hockenos At its core, The Most Beautiful House in the World is a study of the architectures we inherit and the ones we build ourselves—whether with walls, rituals, memories, or myths. It asks how a country of immigrants might seek to define home, and whether that search looks different for those living on ancestral land. It insists that home is not just shelter, but a structure for dreaming. And it tells us, gently, that even grief—like a doll’s pillow or a forgotten ping pong ball—needs a place to live. “The most beautiful house in the world,” writes Witold Rybczynski, “is the one you build yourself.” Hockenos builds hers from smoke, hair, wool, wind, paper, salt, and memory. IMAGE: Isis Hockenos, "Fenced (Naked Ladies)", 2024. Oil, oil stick, and beeswax on linen. 20 x 16 inches. — Isis Hockenos (b. Marshall, California, 1986) studied painting and printmaking at Sarah Lawrence College in New York (BA, 2009) and at Il Bisonte in Florence, Italy. Primarily working with oil paint, India ink, and gouache, Hockenos explores themes of loss, mortality, shape-shifting, transformation, masks, and identity. Through a vibrant visual narrative that aims to disconcert and unnerve, she weaves personal experience and observation into a deeply intimate mythology. Her work is rooted in an interest in human relationships—intimate, erotic, platonic, professional, and self-reflective—and the tensions and dynamics they carry. She lives and works between Los Angeles and West Marin, California.