THE MOON POURED into a murky forest pond covered with lily pads, the green of the 7-11 sign across the street. Aslight glints caught water and mayfly wings, I caught a sideways impression of someone I think I knew, or at least I knewwhat they were doing, though I’d never seen it before. There was a boat or a canoe, or maybe a life raft—some structureof which they had to be in command—and two friends were hunting bullfrogs. I could feel the rhythm of the two bodies onboard, relying on each other’s timing to direct motion, but slowed: time as thick and swampy as the water slapping againstour sides.
***
Implicit in every tool is a longing for more than what our discrete waking lives can hold. Buried in every dream is a wishthat resists its disclosure during daytime hours.
HOW IS A DREAM A FACTORY? (AZZ). A dream is a factory because it makes things, combines, compresses materialinto new forms, raw material from the unconscious; and it does so automatically. It's interesting how often mechanicalobjects in dreams break down. Have you ever gone on a successful car ride in your dreams? I've had so many dreamswhere I'm driving or riding in a car and it breaks down or starts shedding its parts or crashes, etc. I think in the dream thecar is a symbol of control and freedom, or maybe the ego trying to get back in control of the dream [...]. (HF)
Invented long before the car, the wheel was one of the earliest technologies of production, first turning clay into pottery inMesopotamia around 3500 BC. It evokes an understanding of technology as that which extends human capacity: liketouch, movement, communication, and memory. But the wheel also embodies technology’s compression of time intocapital: it became a means of production and marker of class, carts and carriages transporting goods and spreadingsocial hierarchies across previously unthinkable distances.
Just 4 hours and 20 minutes by car away from Detroit, where the buzzing and clanging of auto factories gave birth tomachinic techno (and its own nightlife subculture, a haven from clocking in and burning out), Machine Turn Quickly takesplace in a fellow Rust Belt city. This exhibition considers the material and social histories of hyper-specific but humbletools—”frog gigs,” wheels, labyrinths, paint, to name a few—taking them as starting points for abstract, decompositionalart making. Pittsburgh hovers in the show’s unconscious, wearing the patina of a deteriorated industrial past andeconomic shifts toward an imagined, allegedly immaterial futurity.
Foster and Zhang’s visual languages relish in opposing kinds of knowing, and a psychic formalism countering thegeometric with the so-called “irrational.” “What I keep dreaming of,” Friedrich Kittler explained in an interview, “is thatmachines, especially the contemporary intelligent machines as conceived by [Alan] Turing in 1936, are not there for ushumans—we are, as it were, built on too large a scale—but that nature, this glowing, cognitive part of nature, is feedingitself back into itself.”
Unafraid of the psychedelic and color theory alike, Foster’s coiled canvas paintings offer glowing masses of color thatpunctuate space, where seepage and bleed challenge legibility and boundaries of its form. Zhang’s visual mazes, at timesfractal-like and at other times more akin to wading through the dark, multiply and vibrate without end. Pulsing with theenergy of rotation caught in suspension, Zhang’s electric pinks and Foster’s safety orange and camo green monochromesdeconstruct and build space anew without proposing new fixed orders or images. Unraveling the logic of the machine,these circular paintings of wound canvas and layered geometries dissolve into a haze, rhythmically felt and somaticallyheld, spiraled and vertiginous, frenetic and meditative and dreamlike. And thus, irreconcilably human.
***
The term frogging in crochet and knitting refers to the act of unraveling or pulling out stitches from a crochet project. Theorigin of the term Frogging comes from the world of crochet and knitting where people would often say they are “rippingout” stitches and the repeated act of ripping out each stitch –– such as “rip it” “rip it” is like a frog’s “ribbit.”
Hunter Foster (b. 1993 Little Rock, Arkansas) lives and works in New Haven, CT. He received an MFA in Painting andPrintmaking from Yale School of Art (2023) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015). Selectedexhibitions include Good Weather (Chicago, Little Rock, and North Little Rock), The Anderson at VCUarts (Richmond),Lock Up International (London), Kai Matsumiya (New York), Perrotin (New York), Gern en Regalia (New York), and TheHills Esthetic Center (Chicago).
Ang Ziqi Zhang (b. 1994, Brampton, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA in painting andprintmaking from Yale School of Art (2023). She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York, NY(2024), Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Germany (2024), Iowa, Brooklyn, NY (2023), LVL3, Chicago, IL (2023),Produce Model Gallery, Chicago, IL (2021), among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Chapter,New York, NY (2024), Silke Lindner, New York (2023), Derosia, New York, NY (2023), Jan Kaps Gallery, Cologne,Germany (2023), Good Weather Gallery, Chicago, IL (2022), Each Modern, Taipei, TW (2022), among others.
