Today we’d like to introduce you to Isis Hockenos.
Isis, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Both of my parents were artists and growing up I took it for granted that I’d always make art as well. Because of that, when I moved from Marshall, CA to New York for college and for several succeeding years back in the Bay Area, it felt important to foster my other passions including creative writing and to cultivate my skills as a butcher. However, I couldn’t deny the inevitable pull of paint; of color, texture and form. I craved the exchange of ideas and creative challenge that comes with being surrounded not only by artists but by those working in other parts of the field. I slowly shifted my professional focus entirely to making art and facilitating collaborative creative projects. I am primarily an oil painter but ink and gouache painting and drawing figure heavily in my practice. I’ve also curated several group shows and have an interdisciplinary event series called “Night Fishing” that integrates art, food, music and performance into a fully immersive experience. I spent seven beautiful years in San Francisco and Oakland but by 2019, I’d been seduced by the siren’s call of Los Angeles.
I see LA as a place with room for everyone. I love that you can step through your door at 9am looking like you’re headed to a goth rave like you’re auditioning for Pose (which you probably are) like you’ll be tilling the soil ‘til dusk or are headed to a pool party. Like you’ve been reading to your grandmother. Like you’re an Olympic athlete at the starting line or in gold stilettos or moon boots or sneakers that would pay my rent for a year and not one person bats an eye. I love that, despite change and growth (both positive and negative) the vastness of the city leaves so many pockets untouched. Perhaps these are simply the dreams of a Northern California transplant, eyes clouded by sun-bleached stucco, blinking marquees and forgotten vine covered alleys where cars left for days suffer nothing but spider webs and a couple of beer cans on hoods but compared to the scale of San Francisco, a tiny city that has become increasingly precious, where every square foot is accounted for and guarded brutally, sprawling LA suggests that there is still room for community growth and advocacy. For creative use of space. For drawing new connections and for honoring and supporting the already powerful network of lives and stories that so enchant me and inform my work.
When I first arrived in LA, I co-managed the Chinatown location of a friend’s Oakland-based art gallery that serendipitously opened the same day I drove my full-to-the-brim Toyota pickup truck down from The Bay. Working at the gallery was the perfect introduction to my new city. The gallery’s deep Bay Area roots made the transition especially gentle. When the gallery was forced to close its LA location in March, my close friend Michael Pickoff and I took over the lease. One of my primary personal goals moving to LA was to have a live/work studio space with room for gathering. And windows. Michael, an architect and builder, was excited to have a creative project to play with so together, we reconfigured the space. We built a kitchen with a long table for extended (post-plague) nights of conversation; for plates licked clean (oh to be able to lick plates and fingers and your friends’ fingers again). There is a massive bookshelf with a growing collection of books that friends can add to and borrow from Kerry James Marshall’s Mastry to Russian Folklore Medicine to Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game.
From Maggie Nelson to Roberto Bolaño. There is a napping loft and racks for garments and costumes and collections of Victorian nightgowns. There are thriving plants because there are two giant windows that sport what might be the best view in LA of the Gold Line, squealing past every ten minutes as a reminder of interconnectedness and the underappreciated ambitions of urban planners. There is space to paint and space to get messy and space where clean paper stays clean. Walls are moveable and right now, one third of the space is formatted as a white-walled gallery hosting our first group show, titled “SAP”. May I introduce Burnt Crayon Sandwich, an artist-run digital and physical space that fosters the exchange of ideas through collaboration and conversation across disciplines.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
My road is paved with a series of personal losses. Over the past four years, I lost the three remaining matriarchs in my family, including my mother. This momentous energetic shift opened the door for me to make the move to LA and to focus on myself and my career. Contending with mortality sparked an urgency to work and play and love ferociously. To craft the life that feels truest to me and to their memories and to use the privilege of doing so to support others’ right to dignity, respect and the pursuit of beauty, joy and pleasure.
Please tell us about Burnt Crayon Sandwich.
Burnt Crayon Sandwich is an entirely artist-run space. While the work we show is typically for sale, our agenda is less commercial and more about incubating ideas and having space for our artists and ourselves to try things out, mess up, succeed and support each other in the process.
I am also very grateful for the location. As a new member of the immensely diverse Chinatown community, we have a responsibility to uphold the legacy of the neighborhood and advocate for the voices that continue to be drowned out by hyper-capitalist developers and landlords. Once a week, we are using our kitchen to prepare meals for neighborhood seniors in need and we will continue to integrate social justice work into our programming and ideology as the project develops.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
Anyone who says that they’ve succeeded alone is lying. In order to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps someone needs to have made those boots. In addition to the constant support from friends and family, employers and patrons throughout my career, I feel that it is important to acknowledge the financial side. The women in my family never got to be elders. I would do anything to be able to give them that gift. I ache for their wisdom always. I hope that through this project, my art practice and my budding work as an End-Of-Life Doula, I will retroactively earn and share the small financial security left behind by their premature departure. So much in life is an illusion. Sometimes illusion is magic. I love the freedom that comes with the magical side of illusion. With masking and revealment and shifts in identity. But no matter how much we trust our internal bullshit meter we are all susceptible to the self-doubt and mistrust in our reality that social media perpetuates. I try to practice transparency as much as possible in an effort to reshape our understanding of reality.
In 2018, I also received a very generous artist grant that allowed me to travel to Greece for several months. I rented a little stone house in a village in the Peloponnese where I got to re-known myself as a person on the earth without the assembly of atoms called “mother”. I painted every day, rolling olive pits around in my mouth. My work draws from experience and my surroundings. I weave them into a personal mythology, a cannon of stories that has been developing throughout my life and that I employ in order to understand the world around me. I am interested in human relationships (intimate, erotic, platonic, professional, etc.) and in the push and pull, the tension of these relationships. Isolating myself from the familiarity of home and my established relationships there allowed me to explore this more objectively. There is a strange and beautiful feeling of isolation and gentle loneliness that comes from traveling. Greek mythology and the country’s culture of storytelling fed my love of narrative and affirmed the mysticism that I ascribe to everything around me.
I also have to give a shoutout to my very-much-alive father who is The Trip behind the name Burnt Crayon Sandwich. “Make Mine a Burnt Crayon Sandwich” was a late ‘70s play that he wrote, directed and starred in. The entire cast, mostly bar and restaurant servers was naked. When I look at a painting, I imagine that it is through his eyes.
Contact Info:
- Address: 818 N. Spring St. #202
- Website: www.isishockenos.com and www.burntcrayonsandwich.com
- Phone: (415) 717-8031
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @isistatianahockenos and @burntcrayonsandwich
Image Credit:
Jacob Abern, Melati Citrawireja, Isis Hockenos
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