A bucket drum kit with trash can lids, a marimba made from 12 types of wood, rubber-band-strung pegboard guitars, double-decker turntables with alligator tips, and other manipulated and built musical instruments fill the space of Comfort Station in Madeleine Aguilar and Jordan Knecht’s “(un)learning Center.” As the above list of modified musical instruments suggests, this is a collection of sounding objects that don’t necessarily require any prior musical training (or capability). The baggage of thinking of music production in a certain way would surely obstruct a major intention of this exhibition: to carve a free space to play music, however strange or “bad,” with friends and strangers. The refashioning of an arts encounter, transforming an art space into a veritable place for anyone to jam, is not approached in any directly critical way, but does seem to get to the “(un)learning” of the exhibition’s title. What kinds of new knowledges can emerge from remaking the expectations of encounter? In our contemporary moment, this is a thorny question, and remaking knowledge can share symmetry with the kind of spurious independent research that is the du jour for bad actors of all stripes and power. Where Aguilar and Knecht so deftly diverge and elide this symmetry is in the way that their fantastic musical objects invite unlearning not as an end in itself, but as a mode of relearning. That this relearning not only produces shared new knowledges—we can all be experts on wearable headgear with attached bells—but also joyful and communal moments of play, is a utopian balm in endlessly unstable times.
“(un)learning Center”
Through 6/1: Sun 11 AM–2 PM, Comfort Station, 2579 N. Milwaukee, comfortstationlogansquare.org/may-2025-madeleine-aguilar-and-jordan-knecht
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