Comfort Music + is a weekly performance series curated by Homeroom every Thursday in April at Comfort Station.
7 PM Doors/7:30 PM Show
Comfort Station, 2579 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60647
$ Suggested donation at the door
Thursday, April 25th : Pax in the Frozen Time
Gordon Fung - multimedia
Sam Anthem - multimedia
Lorenzo Osterheim - multimedia
Omnia Sol - multimedia
Sam Anthem
Sam Anthem is a Chicago-based sound and media artist whose performances are dedicated to platforming the unique textures and agencies of affects, technologies, and inanimate things. They often perform with constructed steel pipe woodwinds and electronics.
Gordon Fung
Gordon Fung (b. 1988, San Francisco) is a transdisciplinary artist-curator who works with multi-/new media performances, installations, noise music, experimental film/video, media archaeology, and large-scale curatorial/collaborative practices. His works highlight unconventional executions like equipment misuse, noises, lo-fi presentations, and glitches. Such aesthetics confront the viewers’ understanding, perspective, and point of view on reality through a more philosophical, if not esoteric, investigation.
To expand the possibilities of artistic idioms, he intertwines both analog and digital technologies—also to signify the co-existence of mundane and spiritual worlds. By overloading software and hardware, he collapses the two worlds to expand the audience’s perception of reality. As a break-maker, he deliberately misuses electronic equipment and software to regain consumers’ agency through artistic means. Through media archeology, he strives to unearth the concealed potentials of obsolete audiovisual equipment and to revive them to artistic life.
Informed by his multivalent approach, he forms and directs the experimental time-based arts collective //sense to showcase experimental theater performances, exhibitions, and screenings. Counteracting the marginalization of time-based arts, he curates and fosters a collaborative common ground for sound/video/performance/media artists to create gesamtkunstwerk through synergy. As a firm believer in collectivism, his large-scale curation encourages two maxims: “making good communities better” and “finding arts in all things.” Referencing Fluxus and happenings, he creates brave spaces for participants to unleash their imagination in artmaking through deskilling and unlearning.
Lorenzo Osterheim
Lorenzo Osterheim is an artist and researcher interested in the study of technics. Examining the uses of technology from both a social and phenomenological perspective, his practice spans video, performance, sculpture, and painting. Originally studying oil painting at California State University Northridge, where he received his BA, he has since shifted into media arts. Grounded in a deep appreciation for continental philosophy and media studies his works explore the histories and uses of contemporary technologies. Lorenzo is currently an MFA candidate in the Art Technology / Sound Practices Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Syd Ross (Omnia Sol)
Omnia Sol is a multidisciplinary artist and musician whose work deals with the relationship of nostalgia to media archeology and the surrealist landscapes found between spaces of analog and digital glitch. As an avid collector of old physical media such as VHS and an enthusiast of analog technology in its application to visual and sonic art, Sol began The Omnia Sol Art Show in 2020. This glitch art video talk show consists of artist interviews, music videos, and an expansive onslaught of colorful (and occasionally strobing) plunderoptic video art. Sol also performs as an audiovisual artist as well as providing visuals for DJs and other musicians in the Chicago underground DIT rave scene. Omnia Sol originally began pursuing visual art through techniques of traditional woodblock printmaking which led them down a path of exploration in painting, installation, and performance. In 2020 they began exploring more with time-based media such as video and sound and art and currently pursuing an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation.