Vortex at Buddy in the Chicago Cultural Center

Selections from Comfort Station’s Artists to Watch program

Artists:
Aishath Huda
Magdalena Arguelles
Vic Barquin
Cat Birk
Kara Cobb Johnson
Sara Condo
Kristin Field
Maven Kennedy
Cassidy Skillman
Jenn Smith

Curated by Alexandria Knapik
On view May - October, 2026

Vortex brings together artists whose works examine how materials, bodies, and systems transform through repetition, pressure, circulation, and time. Across many processes displayed, which include: weaving, rubbing, crystallizing, staining, digitizing, and decay, the works together resist fixed identity and instead operate as porous and evolving structures, carrying the marks of softened grids, reconstructed blooms, weathered residues, and ecological imprints. The exhibition embraces abundance and draws from an understanding that meaning, resourcefulness, and transformation emerge from what is already present. Even though that notion is sometimes lost in the vortex of what captures our attention. Through reused materials, gestures, slow processes, and adaptation, the artists collectively reveal abundance within limitation and expansiveness within constraint. Like a vortex (in fluid dynamics), the exhibition gathers disparate practices into motion, allowing meaning to accumulate through return, drift, and relational flow.