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
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
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 –
Madeleine Aguilar and Jordan Knecht
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
June –
Mauricio López F.
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
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 –
Layan Attari, An Emard and Katie Revilla
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_
September –
M. Carson Day
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
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
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.