All posts tagged: Comfort Station

Perto de Lá < > Close to There: Candai Calmon and Anna Martine Whitehead in Conversation

Published by Marina Resende Santos

Candai Calmon is a dance artist and educator based in Salvador, Brazil. Candai has obtained an artistic education in Brazil and Uruguay, with a concentration on contemporary dance and Afro-referential, decolonial, and feminist practices. She holds a Bachelor’s in Gender and Diversity Studies and a Master’s in Dance from the Universidade Federal da Bahia. In her current practice, she creates workshops and immersive artistic experiences based on dance and improvisation with Black women in the quilombos [1] of Bahia. Anna Martine Whitehead is a multidisciplinary artist and dancer based in Chicago. Their work and research address a Black, queer relationship to time, as well as the prison industrial complex and the experience of incarceration. Anna Martine Whitehead has held residencies at 3Arts, Headlands, High Concept Labs, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. They have also written for a number of publications and lectured at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Candai Calmon and Anna Martine Whitehead are two dance artists working through Black, queer, and female experiences. Both are part of …

Snapshot: Gather Series at Comfort Station

Published by Sixty Inches From Center

Snapshot is a Sixty column that takes a quick look at art history as it happens in Chicago. We send artists and organizers short and sweet questions to tell us about what they are doing right at this moment. We sent questions to Allen Moore, Nick Meryhew, and Rebecca Himelstein, the curatorial team behind the Gather series at Comfort Station. Gather is an experimental music series bringing musicians and performers from different scenes, backgrounds, practices, disciplines, and communities together for connection and artistic exchange. For information on their upcoming events, as well as past performances, visit them here.  Sixty Inches From Center: To start broadly, what were you envisioning when you started Gather? Can you give us some context for the title? GATHER: We wanted to represent Chicago’s highly active experimental music and performance community by creating a series that highlighted some different approaches to the artists’ chosen medium. For each bill we attempt to bring together artists who might not otherwise be presented side-by-side. We see this as a way of facilitating new audience and artist interactions …

Sixty on Sixty: An Interview with Andrea Sparr-Jaswa

Published by Miles Johnson

In the wake of her 30th birthday, I joined Andrea Sparr-Jaswa in her beautifully decorated Logan Square apartment. Andrea is a long time resident of the neighborhood and a contributing writer to the Chicago Arts Archive.   Amidst bites of fudge cake, we chatted about Andrea’s academic background, and her opinions on art, Chicago, and orbital sanders. Sixty on Sixty is a new series in which SIFCers interview one another, allowing readers to get to know the fine folks who bring you the latest from Chicago’s art scene. Tell me a bit about your educational background.  How did you get involved with art history and writing for the arts? I went to college for a while, changing my majors and trying to figure out what I wanted to do.  Art history was always the class that I wouldn’t miss, even if it was at 8 AM.  I always liked writing the papers, and I always enjoyed doing the work.  It always seemed so fascinating to me. For a while I pushed against it, because I …

Why Joseph Beuys? A Short Follow Up With Adrian Moens

Published by Nicolette Caldwell

Two weeks ago artist Adrian Moens and I spoke about his exhibition at the Comfort Station located. For fun I presented him with a short survey of six questions called, “The Six Inch Survey.” Below is a brief follow up to the answers he came up with. You can find the original Q and A session here. Why Joseph Beuys? Joseph was a healer and he believed in people. To him, I think, art was medicine. It is incredibly admirable. What does love smell like? Love smells different depending on the person. Love for my father smells like sulfur from a match and then cigarette smoke in the back seat of his old rusted out Mazda. But I’m eight years old, so its just a memory of a smell–it lingers though. Why naked over nude? Naked abandons rules, scoffs at the tired, wagging finger. Wild and unadulterated, naked fills me with a solitude and self-awareness, more profound than the surface of my flesh and a deep sense of ownership of my being. Nude feels heavy-handed …

Artist Adrian Moens at The Comfort Station

Published by Nicolette Caldwell

“Adrian Moens’ multimedia exhibit and installation transmit/transmute integrates sound, sculpture, video, writing and painting. The underlying, and often paired, themes of rhythm and resonance, loss and removal, and empathy and revulsion are addressed through carefully considered minutiae of discreet words, imagery objects and sounds.” (This is an excerpt taken from a full press release provided by The Comfort Station.) transmit/transmute will run from this weekend until July 22. Adrian spent Sunday afternoon at the space for an opportunity to talk with more people who stopped in to check out the show. Below is a short, fun, less formal interview done with the artist. This is the first of many interviews to come called, The Six Inch Surveys. It is our way of getting to know more artists and creative people in a short period of time. 1. When are you at your most creative? When I’m alone 2. What is your drink of choice? Hot coffee. Never, ever iced. Ever. 3. What is your favorite smell? The people I love. 4. If you could collaborate …

The Logan Square Comfort Station: In the 'Art' of a Community

Published by Andrea Sparr-Jaswa

Last fall, as the end of sweater weather drew near, three local artists took advantage of the final surge of Logan Square outdoor market goers to breathe new life into a neighborhood landmark.  If you live or work in the area, you’ve probably passed by it a hundred times, that little Tudor-style building across from the Logan monument.  For years the building dubbed the “Comfort Station” sat empty and untouched, slowly deteriorating.  It was not forgotten, however, and this past fall the City of Chicago leased the turn-of-the-century building, newly restored, to Logan Square Preservation, the volunteer organization responsible for the National Historic District and City Landmark District designations of Logan Square and its boulevards.  This change of hands marked a new era for the Comfort Station that once served as a refuge for streetcar commuters along Milwaukee Avenue.  Within two weeks of the acquisition, Logan Square homeowner, preservation member and artist, David Keel, initiated and executed the Comfort Station’s inaugural gallery exhibition in collaboration with Chicago artists Josh Crow and Terry Swafford. “It’s something …