“Koute mòn yo” (Listen to the mountains)

Work by Alexandra Antoine

Exhibition Dates: January 6th - February 28th, 2020

Every Winter, Comfort Station takes a two month break from it’s regular weekly programming for a Winter installation by a Chicago artist. This year, we have chosen Alexandra Antoine who will be presenting “Koute mòn yo” (Listen to the mountains). This installation is viewable from the outside of the building and will be on view from January 6th to February 28th, 2020. 

Listen to the mountains looks at memory and architectural landscapes of the artists’ childhood summers spent in Léogâne, Haiti. The craftsmanship of the ironwork throughout Haiti, as well as the wider Caribbean, serves as inspiration in the creation of a visual language that incorporates the iconography, religion, and culture that Antoine experienced in the land. The style of the patterns also speaks to the ironwork of the African diaspora that can be seen in Chicago. The work exposes viewers to a landscape that speaks to the very meaning of the native name given to Haiti, Ayiti, meaning 'land of mountains' by the Taino natives who inhabited the land. These landscapes are in stark contrast to that of which is so widely shown through media outlets here in the U.S. but is very fitting for the well known Haitian proverb 'Déyé mòn gen mòn,' behind mountains are more mountains.

Alexandra Antoine is a multidisciplinary artist who holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts and Arts Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently works with Free Write Arts & Literacy as a teaching artist and leads workshops throughout the city. Her work has been exhibited at Rootwork Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Roots & Culture, Roman Susan Gallery, South Side Community Arts Center and Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, IL. Her work is also part of the Arts in Embassies program at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She is the recipient of the inaugural SPARK Micro grant from Chicago Artist Coalition and a DCASE grant. She has completed residencies at ACRE (Steuben, WI) and Ox-Bow (Saugatuck, MI).

SOS Color Code 2020

Luftwerk & Normal

Exhibition Dates: September 15 - November 3, 2020

SOS Color Code 2020 uses the universal languages of Morse code and color theory as a call for humanity and a willingness to help one another. Visualizing Morse code into dots and dashes a pattern forms with each flag representing the letters S (three dots) O (three dashes) S (three dots) and color combinations informed by color theory this installation remains an effective visual distress signal, an ambigram that can be read upside down or right side up. As the world adjusts to new norms in challenging times, SOS Color Code 2020 offers a reconsideration of how language, objects and symbols, and even color can help us find stable ground and safety no matter where we are. 

SOS Color Code 2020 is installed in 10 locations throughout the United States on Sept. 15, 2020, the International Day of Democracy, and will be on display through US Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020. Follow #SOSColorCode to see images of all partner sites. 

Project Description:

Beginning on September 15th, the International Day of Democracy, through the 2020 US Election Day on November 3, SOS Color Code 2020 will transform the international signal of distress into a sign of solidarity and connectedness. Using the universal languages of Morse code and color theory, the three flag installation will appear in multiple locations throughout Chicago and the US, calling for humanity and a willingness to help one another. Visualizing Morse code into dots and dashes a pattern forms with each flag representing the letters S (three dots) O (three dashes) S (three dots) allowing it to remain an effective visual distress signal, an ambigram that can be read upside down or right side up.

When the international distress signal SOS was adopted in 1908, its easily recognizable and unique code produced aural unity, a sense of calm in life or death situations. As the world adjusts to new norms in challenging times, SOS Color Code 2020 offers a reconsideration of how language, objects and symbols, and even color can help us find stable ground and safety no matter where we are. Situated in specific public and domestic settings, during the crucial time leading up to the US Election, SOS Color Code 2020 reminds us, as US Representative John Lewis said, “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.” 

Luftwerk is the artist collaboration of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero. With space as their canvas, they transform environments into immersive experiences. Since founding in 2007, Luftwerk has amassed a significant body of work ranging from site-specific installations to experimental projects that interpret data. In each project they are interested in the abilities of how light and color can be utilized to shift perception and enhance experience. http://luftwerk.net/

Normal is a multi-disciplinary graphic design practice based in Chicago. Normal believes thoughtful design and collaboration strengthens our collective knowledge and defines new ways of seeing, communicating and experiencing the world. Normal is Renata Graw, Tim Curley & Noël Morical. https://thenormalstudio.com/

Take Action:

“Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.” 

John Lewis

Cloudy with a Chance of Ruin

Work by Jan Brugger & Shanna Zentner

Exhibition Dates: March 7th - March 28th

Cloudy with a Chance of Ruin includes new individual and collaborative works by Jan Brugger & Shanna Zentner that reflect on their shared interest in survival, climate change, and “the cloud”. Zentner's cloud is a contagious, emotional atmosphere. Her mural Weather portrays “gossip”. A chattering chain causes clouds to break free from a canvas, while an accompanying zine shows the escaped clouds brainwashing someone. Zentner also uses motifs such as spikes and drops that reference bodily reactions to fear and anxiety like goosebumps, sweat, and tears.

 For Brugger, the cloud is a digital haze that controls a mind hypnotically. Her sculptures and collages reference flooding, strained bodies, and a loss of control that stems from our devices and cultural distractions. In Devices Used to Stay Afloat, Brugger uses water as both a visual and thematic backdrop, her images reflect on the therapeutic and catastrophic qualities of the element through metaphorical and sculptural prompts (sinking, floating, rising, spreading, drowning, melting and crashing). Other forms inspired by bleached coral reefs, classical columns, the altered human body, and vegetation playfully offer two outlooks: adaptation or demise.

 Employing the visual vernaculars of religion and science, Zentner engages world-building strategies rooted in defense mechanisms like the fetishization of conspiracy theories or addiction to information technology. These strategies foster feelings of control and security to combat an atmosphere of confusing and unreliable knowledge sources. Constructing material and narrative relationships between order and entropy, Zentner mirrors and questions these emotional spaces with allegories about the interdependence of knowledge and illusion.

 Brugger’s work also examines illusion and its relationship to power and technology. She creates installations, objects, prints, and videos that simulate and stimulate our interactions with screens and the “bread & circuses” of screen culture. By riding the line between sincerity, humor and ironic detachment, her works exist as digital-age Dadaist arrangements that mock and decipher the disorientation and hopelessness of our oversaturated, decaying, and despondent landscape.

 Both artists question what will survive this storm. Ruins and residues within their work become layered collapses of time and the surviving sediment tells various narratives of existence.

Artist Bios

Jan Brugger (MFA, University of Chicago; BFA, University of Wisconsin) makes digital and physical works that test the screen’s influence on the human body and mind. Her work has recently shown at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (WI), Mana Contemporary (Chicago, IL and Jersey City, NJ), the 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival (MI), LVL3 Gallery (Chicago, IL), Baby Blue Gallery (Chicago, IL), Roman Susan (Chicago, IL), Aggregate Space Gallery (San Francisco, CA), and the Feminist Media Studio at Concordia University (Montreal, QC). Brugger was awarded fellowships and residencies at the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), the University of Chicago (IL), and Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond).

 Shanna Zentner is a Chicago based artist working primarily with painting, silkscreen, and ceramics. She received an M.F.A. from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago and a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She has lectured at The University of Chicago and Purdue University Northwest. In the spring of 2020, Zentner will be an artist in residence at Pilotenkueche in Leipzig, Germany. In 2019 she was a participant in both The Center Program and The New Edition Program at Hyde Park Art Center. She was a Fall Artist in Residence at Ox-Bow in 2017, and an Art, Science, and Culture Fellow at The University of Chicago in 2016. Her work has exhibited in New York, North Carolina, Oregon, and Chicago. She has work in the collection of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and she has a background in scientific illustration.

Routine Maintenance

Work by Andi Crist & JP Culligan

Exhibition Dates: May 1st, 2021 - May 29th, 2021

Routine Maintenance is the first collaborative exhibition between artist and preparator duo Andi Crist and JP Culligan. Influenced by a full range of mundane routines, responsibilities, and ever-tedious tasks, the work in Routine Maintenance is a personal reflection upon the artists’
day-to-day lives as installation specialists in the fine arts field. The invisible tools and materials of exhibition-making are reworked, becoming the focus of paintings, sculptures and site-specific installations. Crist and Culligan hone in on these subjects in the studio, admiring them for their
form and challenging their functions in new and unusual iterations.

Artist Bios

Andi Crist was raised in Birmingham, Alabama and earned her BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2011. She is the founder of Autotelic, a nonprofit arts organization that served artists on the northwest side of Chicago by creating affordable, alternative workspaces and exhibitions
from 2010 until 2017. Crist’s creative practice is primarily sculptural, complemented by a career as a gallery preparator and fabricator. Her work touches on subjects of appropriation, practicality, and the assessment of value, frequently commenting on the industry of exhibition-making and unseen labor.

www.acrist.com

JP Culligan lives and works in Chicago, IL. His work is focused on materials that have been scavenged or purchased from the hardware store including: mis-tinted latex paint, joint compound, and discarded mail-order catalogs. Each work is a chapter in a series of exercises, a
journal entry, or poetic scribble rendered in the searching moments in-between life and work. He earned a BFA from the University of Hartford in 2011.

www.jpculligan.com

 IT MATTERS HOW WE GO: A VESSEL FOR COLLECTIVE LOSS & GRIEF

Chelsea Ross

IT MATTERS HOW WE GO: A VESSEL FOR COLLECTIVE LOSS & GRIEF is an offering and an invitation presented by artist and curator Chelsea Ross (she/they).

In the light and shadows of the last year and a half (and ongoing) of so much, incomprehensible loss, compounded by an inability to gather as communities, IT MATTERS HOW WE GO: A VESSEL FOR COLLECTIVE LOSS & GRIEF transforms Comfort Station’s historic building into a community space dedicated to death, dying, and loss of all kinds. 

Within the VESSEL, Ross shares a selection of personal photographic work created between the deaths of her mother in 2017 and her dog in 2020. Alongside her work, The VESSEL also features an altar designed and constructed in collaboration with Jeffrey Michael Austin. As well as The Artists Grief Deck (in English and Spanish), produced by artist and death doula Adriene Jenik.

Visitors are invited and encouraged to add their own memento mori, objects, images, and ephemera of their own losses of all kinds--family, friends, pets, relationships, jobs, dreams, opportunities, identities... At the end of the residency, a burial ceremony for all the items left within the VESSEL will be held on the Comfort Station lawn.

Chelsea Ross (b. 1983, Chicago, IL) is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Chicago. She explores ideas and practices of community, collaboration, identity, design, and all forms of liberation through photography, curation, writing, and movement. She holds a Master of Art in Design criticism from the School of Architecture at UIC. While her practice is informed by architecture and design thinking, she works decidedly in the realm of art for its elasticity and more direct connection to contemporary culture. Chelsea is planning to become a death doula to deepen her interest in the practices of death and dying.

She prefers curves over corners. While she has lived on the border of Humboldt Park and Logan Square for 15 years, she spends significant time alone in the desert, talking to as few people as possible. 

ANCILLARY PROGRAMMING

DEATH NESTING & HOLISTIC DEATH PRACTICES

How do we prepare for our own deaths and the death of loved ones? What options are available to us? How do structural inequities affect access to holistic death care? How do we honor the intersections of death care and ecology responsibility? 

A conversation with death doulas Adriene Jenick (California), Emmy Colon (Chicago), and Anna Swenson of Recompose Life will explore practices around death and dying that are empowered by knowledge and value aligned.

June 16 | 6pm-8pm CST | Zoom 

YOGA NIDRA WITH ADAM GROSSI 

Yoga Nidra is a meditative practice that facilitates deep rest and relaxation. Traditionally, the nidra is a way of practicing and preparing for one’s own death by releasing the mind and surrendering to a deep state of consciousness. Adam Grossi is an artist, writer, and experienced yoga practitioner who will guide us through an expansive nidra dedicated to release, connection, and transmutation. 

June 25 | 7pm-9pm | Comfort Station & Twitch

CLOSING BURIAL CEREMONY

At the end of the residency, all of the items left within the VESSEL will be buried in the lawn of Comfort Station. We will dig a hole in the ground, place all of the items in the hole, put the earth back into the ground, and plant native flowers in the soil. Burial allows for an intentional release and a slow, digestive transmutation of material and energy. Alyssa Martinez will perform an original poem to close the ceremony.

June 26 | 2pm-4pm | Comfort Station  

*Japanese Zen Koan

 A Run is a Wall

Shir Ende

July 31st - August 28th

Viewing Hours:
Saturdays: 12 - 4pm
Sundays: 10am - 2pm

Shir Ende’s practice is rooted in the tensions between movement, space, and the physical constructs which guide (and often inhibit) what forms our movements take. From walls, doorways, windows, and stairs, to the distance from one side of the room to another, Ende turns architecture inside out, in a sense, proposing that our bodies’ motions might sculpt space rather than the other way around. Using choreography as a bodily mechanism for creating and transforming a built environment, Ende reimagines architectural features as more malleable than the forms we’ve come to know.

Ende’s new body of screen and block prints and videos, on view in the exhibition, further these explorations as they reimagine how the hard lines of a floor-plan, blueprint, or architectural rendering might be if instead they were imperfect, humanized, and even ephemeral. Familiar spaces, including Comfort Station itself, are constructed through movements; running, walking sideways, raising one’s arms in a particular way are indexed as motions corresponding to architectural features. For example: “A run is a wall.”

Through her work, Ende demonstrates a softening of barriers and an agency of body. The idea of our movements “making a room” implies shelter as a human gesture of care, concern, or protection. It’s a notion that something can be made from nothing. The role of collaboration here is essential, perhaps because these imagined spaces are “built” through a degree of belief. The labor of these constructions doesn’t require heavy materials or tools; it requires that we trust in our potential to “build” something through small gestures that will, in turn, embrace the particularities of our bodies, moving how they choose.
(Text by Elizabeth Lalley)

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

The artists:

Jasper Goodrich is an artist and educator living in Chicago, Illinois. The artist Lee Bontecou wrote, “It is in the spirit of these feelings that my work was and is still being made.” The worlds and feelings that Jasper’s work exist in are: the expansive and iterative nature of the human imagination, the magic world of images, sequential ways of organizing information, spirituality, making collaboratively with other people, influences from music and music production, and the connection between iteration and the social. Goodrich works in mediums including painting, printmaking, sculpture, drawing, and photography. He has exhibited nationally in venues in Illinois, New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. He has received grants, awards, and/or residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Ox-Bow School of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center, and the National Iron Casting Conference. Goodrich currently teaches in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Printmedia Department and at the Hyde Park Art Center where he leads a class titled “Sequences, Iterations, and Permutations.”

Justin Nalley is a Chicago based visual artist, poet, and healing arts facilitator. He is currently working on a book of poems, drawings, and ephemera titled, Yes, I Can Understand Your Feeling This Way. Nalley has exhibited widely throughout the US, including Perspectives Gallery (MIAD), The American Institute of Thoughts and Feelings (Tucson, AZ), Compound Yellow (Oak Park, IL), and Comfort Station (here, right now in Chicago, IL). He received a BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Salim Moore is a visual artist who thinks about fantasy and its limitations and possibilities through drawing, painting, and printmaking. He casts himself, his friends, and others as characters in the stories found in ballads, folktales, and myths. For inspiration, he looks to works of epic fiction as well as the day dreams one might experience while window shopping, equally. He believes that collaborating with Jasper and Justin on Snake, the Hunter, and Bell will open up novel ways for audiences to consider the diverse perspectives of the fantastical.

He was born in Pasadena, CA, which is located in the unincorporated foothills of Los Angeles. He received his BA in Art History from Reed College in 2011 and his MFA from the Painting & Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently the Assistant Curator of Collections at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, in Claremont, California.

 Snake, the Hunter, and Bell

Jasper Goodrich, Justin Nalley, and Salim Moore

September 4th 2021 - October 3rd 2021

Over the past year, Jasper Goodrich, Justin Nalley, and Salim Moore collaborated on a project that intersects intuitive modes of making with their differing interests in fantasy: the magical, the narrative, the artistic, and the personal, all acting as a tinted lens to process society. “Snake, the Hunter, and Bell” is the result of this collaboration. The exhibition features both individual and collaborative work including drawings, site-specific installations, sculptures, paintings, prints, and poetry that serve as suggestions for the various ways people engage with their heart’s desire.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a story about a station in the woods, an old inn for travelers to rest their hat. Although it was deserted, three travelers, a Snake, a Hunter, and a bellmaker named Bell met at the inn on a misty night. For months they lived there, trading stories around the fire, planting flowers, fixing the well, building archways, and patching the roof. Everything was fine until one night their light was stolen.

Embarking on a journey that would take near their entire lifetime to complete, the three travelers set out to regain their light.

What you are seeing here is the old inn after they all passed away. Upon regaining their light, they lived relatively happily in the station painting pictures from their memories. It wasn’t until you entered that the light flickered and turned into something new.

Alden Burke is a Chicago-based educator, facilitator, and writer driven by the question “What are we going to learn from one another?" Her work centers around supporting collaborative making, process-based work, care in administrative practices, and creative sustainability. Alden is the Co-Founder of Annas, the Program Manager at Design for America, and a Lead Organizer for the Chicago Arts Census. 

Caroline Joy Dahlberg is a performer, writer, and sensory choreographer. Her work focuses on the precarity of bodies, ranging from the scale of the ocean to a molecule. She uses intimate encounters and visceral metaphors to describe affections of closeness and loss, becoming and undoing. She received her BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2014, and her MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018.

Mariel Harari creates nonlinear, autobiographical stories that invite viewers into worlds of decadent and nostalgic absurdities. Her work inhabits a space between trauma and escape. Grounded by laborious, often gendered processes Harari uses bright colors, surreal forms, soft, tactile, and shiny surfaces to uproot the viewer from that grounding. Harari works across installation, fiber, video, sculpture, and performance; drawing reference from fashion, science fiction, fairy tales, gender expectations, and personal narrative. She has been rewarded residencies at Annas Projects, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, High Concepts Labs, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been featured in publications including Brooklyn Magazine and Surface Design Association. She has exhibited and performed work throughout New York, Chicago, and Miami. Harari was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. 

Azalea Henderson work acts as a materially-inclusive collection of non-utile art objects, varying in matter and form. Her collage of a practice is rooted in ceramics and writing, which are often incorporated in installations.

Stephanie Koch is a facilitator, curator, and writer based in St. Louis and Chicago. She engages in institution-building as a creative practice and exhibition-making as a site of testing sociopolitical possibilities. She is currently the Gallery Director of The Luminary, an art institution based in St. Louis focused on art, thought, and action, a Co-Founder of Annas, an independent art space based in Chicago dedicated to the critical role of exhibiting process and collaboration, and a Lead Organizer of the 2021 Chicago Arts Census, a city-wide research project which collects, maps, and visualizes data that illuminates the lived experiences and working conditions of art workers in Chicago.

 Maggie Wong makes art, writes about art, writes art, reads art, shares art, mentors artists, and is mentored by artists. She studies. Maggie queries through play to create social and sculptural forms of collective world-building amidst conditions of sentimentality, loss, and subjugation. To do this, she makes sculptures, prints, recordings, essays, sometimes performs, facilitates workshops, creates syllabi, and often works collaboratively. Usually, she makes lists.

Maggie received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she now works as a lecturer. Additionally is the Associate Director of Iceberg Projects in Rogers Park, Chicago. Her affiliations include Chicago API Artist United and ACRE where she is interim Development Director. 

 U T E N S I L

What is a prompt?

A prompt is an invitation to ease into entanglements, a generous permission to act, a container to explore a stretch in thought, a resurrected memory. 

A prompt is an instruction. A prompt as a transition, bringing us to another space, another other, another self. A prompt as a thought experiment, as sensorial vibrancy, as a meeting of the unexpected. A stretch in thought, the resurrected memory. A prompt also asks: What is at stake, what tools are needed for vulnerability? 

A prompt can move us. Find a utensil—trace the lengths of your arms; ask someone to trace the length of your arms; ask if you can trace the length of theirs; offer to trace them into the sky; ask if they might do the same for you. 

A prompt contains self-reflection. Always around the corner is a world of people outside with which to build our collaboration. In becoming research, when we build from prompts, when we work from our conditions, how do we share and reperform with an audience? What are the limits? 

Annas presents Utensil, opening at Comfort Station on November 6 from 2:00-6:00 pm. 

The work is a continuation of the collective and prompted efforts of Alden Burke, Caroline Dahlberg, Mariel Harari, Azalea Henderson, Stephanie Koch, and Maggie Wong.