ANNOUNCEMENT // 2025 Exhibitions – Meet the artists!
We’re thrilled to announce the artists selected for our 2025 Exhibitions cycle!
After reviewing hundreds of incredible submissions, we’re excited to share this diverse cohort of artists and their captivating work that will be featured throughout the next year at Comfort Station.
Stay tuned for more details about the artists and their upcoming exhibitions.
March –
Dushko Petrovich Córdova
PNTG is a wide-ranging exploration of digital-era visual culture through a reconfiguration of traditional approaches to painting.
All works are painted sous verre—in reverse, on glass—with an airbrush, manually reconstructing the back-lit, saturated color-world of the images we look at on our phones and computers. The resulting objects make the mechanized and human-made qualities visible in turn, making it clear—sometimes at second glance, sometimes after repeated inspection—that the image is imperfect, slightly off. The gap between the digital image and the painted afterimage is where the meaning of these works transpires. While the original photograph records a light-event, the resulting painting transpires at a slight remove, shifting our attention to the construction, circulation and, most of all, to the reception of the image.
This reception of digital images—in ever-increasing quantities and of ever-evolving kinds—is the central concern of the PNTG project. I have started out by tracking image-types that evidence some form of overload, because this is where the condition of the machine mirrors the psychology of the viewer.
The first set of PNTG images, of police sirens, are sourced from situations where a local news outlet didn’t have or didn’t want to publish an image of the actual event. The sirens run alongside headlines that combine the vague and the specific: “Blood Leaking From Ceiling,” “Spooner Middle School Situation,” or “Fire and Violence on Tenth and Grand.” Taken one at a time, these images stand in for a specific event, often with horrific, unpublishable visual details. Taken together, they stand in for a now-widespread ambiance of emergency, for the epidemic of police violence, and for the evolving recognition that we are living in a police state.
Dushko Petrovich Córdova (b. Quito, 1975) works across media as an artist, critic, publisher, and educator. He is a co-founder of Paper Monument, which has published numerous critically acclaimed books, including Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. Petrovich has also produced Adjunct Commuter Weekly and The Daily Gentrifier under his personal imprint, DME. He has written about art and visual culture for many publications including n+1, Bookforum, and the New York Times. His work has been exhibited at galleries and museums nationally and internationally—including Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and Gallery 400 in Chicago—and has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, The New Yorker, and the New York Times, among many others. Petrovich currently serves as professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
April –
Alana Ferguson
Ferguson create humorous work that contends with popular markers of success - marriage, procreation, and capital gain - and their complications. The sculptures reference the body through bulbous forms, covered in collaged images of skin culled from photographs of their immediate family. These bodily forms are juxtaposed with brightly colored steel components, calling to mind kitchen appliances. The sculptures perform superfluous kinetic actions, or suggest the ability to do so through the inclusion of spouts, springs, and switches. The drawings are developed on architectural plans that were inherited from their father in law, and are framed as “user guides” for the sculptures. They are developed intuitively, with overlapping text and images, and the incorporation of 3 dimensional materials such as paper pulp and egg shells. Throughout this body of work, contrasting visual languages are jammed together to create a bright and humorous cacophony.
Alana Ferguson is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Chicago. She creates humorous artwork that critically examines her roles as daughter, wife and mother.
May –
Layan Attari, An Emard and Katie Revilla
Echoes of the distant past, blending historic residues to illustrate imaginary homecomings, and exploring our collective of mutating stories, Layan Attari, An Emard, and Katie Revilla approach the use of memory and archive within Chicago’s landscape to consider the role of possession and time. They each approach these themes across disciplines and ideas that converge in the center of pointing to the gaps between intervention and control. As we move, the soil we live on becomes a container, a time capsule, and an archive that responds to our step and holds the memory of our presence. Mausoleums and museums are built to hold our waste and the relics to lives lived. Together, their works address and become an action potential that expands the very parameters of both the self and historical landscape of the city in which we inhabit. These approaches alongside each other convey a vision for the future: a land truly reflective of its history, a living archive of all those who make their home upon it.
An Emard is an interdisciplinary artist seeking to locate the myth-making and world-building potentials of queerness and queer futurity. They were born into a working-class family in suburban Micqanaqa’n and Chumash Land / Ventura, CA and spent their formative years navigating queerness in the shadow of the Catholic Church and the light of lemon orchards, asphalt, and the Pacific Ocean. Emard now resides on the unceded homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa as well as the Menominee, Miami and Ho-Chunk nations / Chicago, IL. Their work has most recently been shown in the two person exhibition Tired Light at WeatherProof (Chicago) in Fall 2023. Emard has exhibited across the US at venues including WeatherProof, Steve Turner Gallery, Block Museum, Usdan Gallery, Kibum MacArthur, Some Clouds, among others. In 2016, they participated in a residency with Chin’s Push Los Angeles. They received their BA from Bennington College in 2015 and their MFA from Northwestern University in 2022.
Katie Revilla is an anti-disciplinary artist that considers the hybridization of nature and material to convey narratives centered around the Filipino diaspora and post colony. The framework of her practice is largely driven by the historical embeddedness that items can hold within themselves to create their own ontologies and how that can shift and amplify boundaries of objectification. In 2018, she was an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, a recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship in 2020, and attended ACRE Residency in 2021. She recently graduated from Northwestern University in 2023 with an MFA in Art, Theory, and Practice. Currently, she is an artist in residence in Northern California at Social Studies Residency, researching rice and farming history connected to her grandfather.
@katierevilla
Layan Attari (b. Kuwait) is a visual artist who seeks to understand how meaning is preserved, passed on, and transformed within the nation-state. Her work challenges the invisible forces that shape perception and connection. She has participated in the Chuquimarca’ Tanda 2024 Research Cohort, Campus Art Dubai 8.0 residency program (2020), Fikra Designer-in-Residence (2020), and is a recipient of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship (2018-2019). She received her MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in 2023.
@layanattari_
June –
Mauricio López F.
This exhibition is constructed from the perspective of the foreigner and how their background shifts when faced with a new environment. This process is filled with tensions that lead to fragmented perspectives, where each gesture evokes distinct questions, all viewed through the lens of comparison, shaped by the contrast with what has been left behind. These experiences are primarily expressed through two mediums: sound sculptures and graphic scores.
"60625" is a sound sculpture crafted from found objects and sound collages. It mimics a miniature building structure using vertically arranged card filing drawers, within which six hidden speakers play a multitrack composition made from recordings of typical apartment sounds. The piece captures the varied auditory interactions that occur in shared living spaces, illustrating how people often learn more about their neighbors through sound than sight. It emphasizes the relationship between sound and privacy, showing how sound can travel through walls, revealing activities on both sides.
The exhibition also features a new graphic score inspired by Logan Square, created by walking through its streets and observing the situations that unfold during this exploration. These observations are transformed into visual symbols that represent the small stories and moments within the community. The score is integrated into the exhibition space, with signs that illustrate these moments. The goal is to offer a dynamic interpretation of the environment, showcasing community interactions and inviting the audience to engage with them through both sound and visual storytelling.
Mauricio López F. is a sound artist and music composer born in Santiago de Chile and currently based in Chicago, USA. His work explores various mediums in sound art, such as sculptures, sonic assemblage, graphic scores, and performances with unconventional instruments. These works, often seen through a sardonic lens, deal with themes of privacy, translation and social misunderstandings. His pieces have been presented in Perú, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic. Mauricio is currently pursuing an MFA in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, supported by the New Artist Society Scholarship.
@mauriciolopezfernandez
July –
Rex Delafkaran, Ricardo De Lima, Akim Farrow, and Mohabbat Khatibnia–Mansouri
“touch and accuracy” is an installation framed by the structures of bowling, and is meant to be bowled. Each artist is producing a set of pin-like sculptures, together making a conglomerate set. A pin’s destiny is to be knocked down, to fall over, and through the use of sculpture and experimentation we are extracting larger dynamics of power, autonomy, and camaraderie at play inherent in the structure across competitive sports, starting at Comfort Station, with the deceptively simple rules, objects, and symbols of Bowling.
We are working in the framework of our ongoing project called “sad at sports.” "sad at sports" converges athletic fervor with artistic inquiry, presenting a nuanced discourse on the intersectionality of sports, society, and personal identity. The project, through a multi-faceted lens of sculpture, interactive installation, and live performance, deconstructs and celebrates the cultural fabric woven by sports traditions. It scrutinizes the glorification and critique within athletics, highlighting the inherent dualities of competition — unity versus division, triumph versus despair. This work not only venerates the aesthetic and communal aspects of sports but also challenges the viewer to contemplate the underlying narratives of power, resistance, and identity that shape our collective and individual ethos.
We are four artists based in Chicago, forming a series of installations driven by our collective captivation by sports.
Ricardo De Lima is a Colombo-Venezuelan artist and abolitionist whose practice interrogates the sociocultural and physical mechanisms of power embedded in everyday life. Working across sculpture, sound, video, and experimental software practices, he reconfigures, intervenes, and remanufactures objects and materials to expose their performative authority and inherent fragility. He has exhibited and performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge; and the Havana Biennial. De Lima co-curated Pico Picante, a monthly transnational bass music and culture event in Boston for over ten years, and Spectacle Boston, a collaborative performance space for experimental film, music, and video.
He is the 2015 recipient of the James and Audrey Foster Prize, an annual award from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, that recognizes artists making significant contributions to contemporary art through innovative and thought-provoking work. De Lima has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA and the Vermont Studio Center and is currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
@ricardo___delima
Rex Delafkaran is an interdisciplinary artist and dancer from California, based in Chicago. Tied up in her sculptures is a dedication to concepts of futility and the abject, and the occasional awkwardness of sincerity and tenderness. Through her queer, Iranian, American, and feminist aesthetic lineage and history she investigates what materials we have at our disposal to make meaning, and where we mythologize utility and identity. Using movement and objects she plays with the failure and poetry among bodies, objects, and language.
Delafkaran has exhibited and staged performances at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Panoply Performance Lab, Brooklyn, NY; Platform Art Fair, Athens, Greece; Satellite Art Fair, Miami, FL; Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and the Textile Museum, Washington, DC; among others. She is a recent recipient of a NARS Foundation International Artist Residency Fellowship and a Warhol Foundation “Wherewithal Research Grant.” Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance Art from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a forthcoming Masters in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
@rex_delafkaran
Akim Farrow – As a mixed-race Black artist shaped by mountain landscapes, Farrow’s work in steel and found metal explores layered realms of identity, myth, and memory. Each sculpture is a living, breathing site of world-building where industrial materials, charged with history, invite viewers to engage intimately with personal and collective stories. Through these objects, Akim seeks to transform the rawness of the Anthropocene into a more honest and evocative exploration of self, community, and place, celebrating our shared human experience in all its intricate beauty.
@blacksmvth
Mohabbat Khatibnia-Mansouri is an Iranian artist based in Chicago, IL. Mohabbat has a background practicing Socially Engaged Arts, and is currently using clay as a medium to deepen their sculptural practice.
@mohabbat.mansouri
August –
Madeleine Aguilar and Jordan Knecht
(un)learning Center is an amorphous venn-diagram of two peoples’ practices. Over three years of both direct collaboration and parallel play, Madeleine Aguilar & Jordan Knecht have spilled into each other, intuitively developing a methodology of improvisation, responsiveness and iterative creation. The result is a collection of structures and published works which nurture (un)learning, exploration, and collaboration.
The exhibition will contain modular, interactive sound making structures built individually + collaboratively by the artists, serving as documents of mutual iteration. These structures are designed to nullify expertise, prioritizing collective exploration, empathetic interaction and ecstatic improvisation. The structures invite multiple players at once, cultivating a sonic-social awareness in relation to one another and all who are sharing the space.
For this exhibition, Aguilar and Knecht will curate a series of performances, inviting a variety of soundmakers to engage with these structures, pushing performers into new territory though creative constraints and expanding the sonic vocabulary of the objects, whose uses + functions are invented (discovered) anew with each use. As the structures are activated throughout the duration of the exhibition, distinction between visitor/creator/collaborator/artist quickly becomes unclear (and unnecessary).
The alcove in the gallery will host a library and self-service gift shop, displaying the parallel and intersecting publishing practices of Aguilar and Knecht. Madeleine Aguilar is the founder and operator of bench press, a risograph press based in Chicago, focusing on collaborative projects and interactive guides and workbooks. Jordan Knecht is the founder and operator of Wave of Unknowing, a textile publishing house focusing on small-run and unique series of garments. Books and garments will be available to browse and purchase in a non-centralized store in which purchases are made based on trust. The two artists will collaborate on new garments and books specifically for this exhibition.
madeleine is an artist + musician from chicago. her work is often mobile / modular / interactive and can be found in backyards, libraries, storefronts, homes, galleries & book fairs. using the archive as form, she acknowledges the passing of time by cataloging lived spaces, collected objects, familial histories, personal relationships, natural phenomena, mundane routines, and ephemeral moments.
she is the founder of bench press, a risograph press focusing on collaborative projects and interactive guides + workbooks. bench press often partners with artists & friends who are new to the book as form, utilizing the risograph as a tool for skill sharing and cultivating friendships. she currently runs the Print Lab in the School of Design at the University of Illinois Chicago and co-teaches a summer risography & bookmaking at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency.
@__bench_press
Jordan Knecht is an artist, educator, musician, and vinyl DJ based in Chicago. Jordan is the founder of artist book publishing house, Adult Punk, day-long artist residency, Blueprint Residency, textile publishing entity, Wave of Unknowing, and micro-record shop, Somebody Else's. Jordan’s work has been presented through MCA Chicago, Denver Art Museum, MCA Denver, SFMOMA, and Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. I’m pretty sure this is the first conventional bio Jordan Knecht has ever written about himself.
@jordanknecht
September –
M. Carson Day
Day interrogates capitalism with poetics and deadpan humor. Capitalism is responding disproportionately.
Invoking professional experience as a fabricator, his practice attempts to ride a line between prop comedy and critical theory. Deeply inspired by class politics and professional wrestling, but overwhelmed by the spectacle, the found-object becomes their vessel of concerns, acting as the physical junction of art, work, and value; class, culture, and satire.
The work is generated from stream-of-consciousness writing, associative thought-spirals, and obnoxious wordplay. Materially, the source-object or source-text dictates the form of the end result, however my tendencies toward printmaking are insistent: paintings, drawings, texts (and recent expansions into film, installation, and sound) are developed through layering physical and conceptual processes and systems that intend to question the “voice” of the work (or rather pro-wrestling’s own “kayfabe”) by distancing the hand from the idea. The outcome is often slippery and circular in its positions, wondering which expectations to subvert—objects become monuments to their own objecthood, criticisms of their own purpose, punchlines to their own jokes.
As the world gets weirder, the work responds disproportionately.
M. Carson Day has stocked shelves at a Michael’s craft store in central Texas and made cheese on goat farms in rural Maine. In 2012, Day touched a lock of Edgar Allen Poe’s hair. In 2014, he missed his chance to make props professionally in Hollywood and has since spent over a decade working as an artist assistant and fabricator in both Los Angeles and Chicago. He has studied art at Indiana University, Glasgow School of Art, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) where he is currently an MFA candidate in his second year.
Some of his recent work includes: “blue bird, blue boy,” an ongoing series of visual associations that ties a found popsicle stick to Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy by way of a rubber chicken and beyond; “fatal 4-way, or a 4-plait braided conference call,” a poem for 4 voices recorded as a 4-channel sound piece, comprised entirely of found text from “masculine” literature and professional wrestling magazines from the late twentieth century; “Our Towne™,” a developing body of work that attempts to dive into the world of literary fiction by expanding/rebuilding a hobby model of an idealistic American main street.
@mcarsonday
October –
Le Hien Minh
“Ornamentalism" is a series of artworks that deeply engage with the multifaceted experiences of Vietnamese female nail technicians in America through sculpture, installation, and moving images. This body of work explores the nail salon industry—a sector predominantly shaped by Vietnamese women—as a lens through which societal perceptions and entrenched biases can be critically examined and challenged. More broadly, ”Ornamentalism" explores how migration from the Global South to the Global North, intertwined with the complex dynamics of Western cultural biases and molded by the long-standing effects of war and political turmoil, impacts both individual and collective identity.
Each artwork in the series— Invisible Dragon, Blessed Lady of the Nail, Minority Model, Nail Women, and Apocalypse Nail—addresses different aspects of the Asian female experience in America through the prism of the nail salon industry. For instance, the Invisible Dragon wall installation features hands in Eastern religious gestures, adorned with long pink nails, addressing the "dragon lady" stereotype and highlighting the dual visibility and invisibility of "pink labor." The Blessed Lady of the Nail figurative sculpture incorporates elements from Eastern and Western spiritual traditions to honor those in "Pink Labor" sectors. The Minority Model wall installation uses thousands of acrylic nail protuberances to critique the homogenization of Asian identities. The Nail Women documentary video gives voice to Vietnamese nail technicians, capturing their personal thoughts on identity shaped by cross-cultural experience. The Apocalypse Nail sculpture merges the iconography of the Vietnam War with symbols of the beauty industry, contrasting historical and contemporary representations of Vietnamese women.
These pieces connect the individual experiences of nail technicians to broader socio-economic contexts in order to reveal the complex effects of living with pervasive biases. At the same time, the work acknowledges these technicians' resilience, self-determination, and personal power while emphasizing their often overlooked labor.
Le Hien Minh is an artist born in Vietnam. Growing up in war-torn Vietnam during the political and economic shifts of the 80s and 90s shaped her vision, steering her towards work that directly engages with social issues and explores alternative cultural paradigms, envisioning realities beyond the current patriarchal framework. Central to her work is the female experience, as Minh intricately weaves together socio-historical and cultural narratives. Her contemplative yet provocative art blends mystical and spiritual elements with metaphysical and surrealistic concepts, encouraging reflection on the complex interplay between visible and invisible systems that govern our lives.
Le Hien Minh has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, including Sculpture Expanded by the Association of Finnish Sculptors in Finland, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, Gallery 400 in Chicago, and the Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts. Her work has been reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, ArtAsiaPacific, Ocular Magazine, among others. Minh has received numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies from institutions such as the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, and the Goethe-Institut.
@le_hien_minh
November –
Rob Croll
Waymark invokes the history of Comfort Station as a site of waiting, not a destination but an interval between stages of a journey. Imagined as a tableau vivant in the reduced form of winter gloves and jackets, the site-specific installation acts as a speculative representation of the hands and bodies of people who passed through the space in decades past. Through these suspended gestures and their suggestions of tension or ease, the exhibition considers how the inward experience of time hinges on outward circumstances. During the run of the show, the gallery will concurrently function as the collection site for a clothing drive, using the public visibility of the site to generate local participation. The installation—intended to survive through documentary rather than material traces—will be disassembled at the end of the month, and the clothing used as its primary material will be redistributed through community organizations alongside the items donated by visitors.
Rob Croll (b. 1993, Asheville) is an artist and writer living in Chicago. His work begins with photography but allows its conceptual possibilities to play out anachronistically across other media. Croll holds a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded the James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship. In addition to his artistic practice, he has worked extensively as a literary translator; his publications include books by Ricardo Piglia and Hebe Uhart.