Comfort Station presents La Casa de Todos / Everyone’s Home, an exhibition by Chicago-based artist Edra Soto. Soto’s practice draws from her Puerto Rican roots to instigate conversations about history, diasporic identity, and constructed social orders. La Casa de Todos builds on her ongoing project “Graft,” which integrates architectural intervention and social practice.
With this public installation, Soto invites the community to celebrate a shared home together. La Casa de Todos, or “Everyone’s Home,” reconfigures Via Chicago Architects + Disenadores’ work titled SCAFFOLD, transforming its structure by overlapping abstract carved panels and delineating safe zones destined to house public gatherings and moments for celebration.
The decorative motifs carved to the panels are directly sourced from representations of rejas (wrought iron screens) commonly found throughout Puerto Rico. The structure’s multicolored palette, a new approach to Soto’s work, was sourced from the archipelago’s residential architecture. Her representations of rejas propose and celebrate the cultural value of Puerto Rico’s lower- and middle-class communities. Soto’s works investigate and make visible the relationships between Puerto Rican cultural memory, its African and Black heritage, and the threads of colonial historical lineage of the United States.
Beginning with the exhibition opening on June 15, Comfort Station is hosting a series of related performances and programming, many of which are co-produced by the Palenque LSNA neighborhood association of Logan Square.
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An initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art in partnership with artists and organizations across the city, Art Design Chicago is a series of events and exhibitions that highlight the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.
