ROMANCE
Hunter Foster & Ang Ziqi Zhang
Machine Turn Quickly
Sept 12–Nov 2, 2025
THE MOON POURED into a murky forest pond covered with lily pads, the green of the 7-11 sign across the street. As light glints caught water and mayfly wings, I caught a sideways impression of someone I think I knew, or at least I knew what they were doing, though I’d never seen it before. There was a boat or a canoe, or maybe a life raft—some structure of which they had to be in command—and two friends were hunting bullfrogs. I could feel the rhythm of the two bodies on board, relying on each other’s timing to direct motion, but slowed: time as thick and swampy as the water slapping against our sides.
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Implicit in every tool is a longing for more than what our discrete waking lives can hold. Buried in every dream is a wish that resists its disclosure during daytime hours.
HOW IS A DREAM A FACTORY? (AZZ)
A dream is a factory because it makes things, combines, compresses material into new forms, raw material from the unconscious; and it does so automatically. It's interesting how often mechanical objects in dreams break down. Have you ever gone on a successful car ride in your dreams? I've had so many dreams where 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 the car 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 in Mesopotamia around 3500 BC. It evokes an understanding of technology as that which extends human capacity: like touch, movement, communication, and memory. But the wheel also embodies technology’s compression of time into capital: it became a means of production and marker of class, carts and carriages transporting goods and spreading social 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 to machinic techno (and its own nightlife subculture, a haven from clocking in and burning out), Machine Turn Quickly takes place in a fellow Rust Belt city. This exhibition considers the material and social histories of hyper-specific but humble tools—”frog gigs,” wheels, labyrinths, paint, to name a few—taking them as starting points for abstract, decompositional art making. Pittsburgh hovers in the show’s unconscious, wearing the patina of a deteriorated industrial past and economic shifts toward an imagined, allegedly immaterial futurity.
Foster and Zhang’s visual languages relish in opposing kinds of knowing, and a psychic formalism countering the geometric with the so-called “irrational.” “What I keep dreaming of,” Friedrich Kittler explained in an interview, “is that machines, especially the contemporary intelligent machines as conceived by [Alan] Turing in 1936, are not there for us humans—we are, as it were, built on too large a scale—but that nature, this glowing, cognitive part of nature, is feeding itself back into itself.”
Unafraid of the psychedelic and color theory alike, Foster’s coiled canvas paintings offer glowing masses of color that punctuate space, where seepage and bleed challenge legibility and boundaries of its form. Zhang’s visual mazes, at times fractal-like and at other times more akin to wading through the dark, multiply and vibrate without end. Pulsing with the energy of rotation caught in suspension, Zhang’s electric pinks and Foster’s safety orange and camo green monochromes deconstruct 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 somatically held, spiraled and vertiginous, frenetic and meditative and dreamlike. And thus, irreconcilably human.
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The term frogging in crochet and knitting refers to the act of unraveling or pulling out stitches from a crochet project. The origin of the term Frogging comes from the world of crochet and knitting where people would often say they are “ripping out” stitches and the repeated act of ripping out each stitch –– such as “rip it” “rip it” is like a frog’s “ribbit.”
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Hunter Foster (b. 1993 Little Rock, Arkansas) lives and works in New Haven, CT. He received an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art (2023) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015). Selected exhibitions 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 The Hills Esthetic Center (Chicago).
Hunter Foster (b. 1993 Little Rock, Arkansas) lives and works in New Haven, CT. He received an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art (2023) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015). Selected exhibitions 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 The Hills Esthetic Center (Chicago).
Ang Ziqi Zhang (b. 1994, Brampton, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA in painting and printmaking 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.