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Photos courtesy of Casey Orozco
Sycamore Spells was exhibited at Central Server Works in Los Angeles in 2023.
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Sycamore Spells furthers Theselius’s engagement with experiences of family, memory, superstition, and mortality. Central to her 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 series Theselius works acrylic paint and colored pencil into floral arrangements on wood panel, canvas, and paper, forming a recurring X in their respective centers. She then asks her son and daughter to introduce marks of their own using oil pastels and colored pencils. 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 that 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 sheer cotton fabric. The drawings show homes in the Sycamore Grove neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Theselius used to live. Drawn on delicate fabric but overflowing with detail, the fabric speaks to the artist’s extant drawings of interior space.
These works also reveal the event that served as the catalyst of the exhibition. Inspired by a recurring daydream amidst California’s wildfire season, Theselius drew her neighbors’ homes engulfed in flames, hoping to cast a preventative spell over their dwellings and forestall her visions of disaster.
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.