Produce Model is proud to present Fleece Engine, a solo exhibition by Angela Ziqi Zhang. The exhibition opens on April 24, 2021 with an opening reception from 7-10pm. The exhibition will be on view until June 12.

Please email producemodel.gallery@gmail.com to schedule an appointment.

COVID restrictions are in place and masks are required. Thank you, we look forward to seeing you.

Press Release:

January 17, 2014
The lesson is to copy an existing artwork.
Notes from class read:
“Angela Zhang: Paul Gauguin, The day of the god, 1894. Color as plastic and materiality.”
Mahana no atua
The physical act of copying builds awareness between the eyes and the hands. It is training, instinct and mimicry. It opens the door.
Why is a face beautiful? The second or third lesson, a theoretical prompt from a text.

Angela and cat hair. Angela and materiality. Angela’s childhood home. Angela’s mother.

February 7, 2014
I post a photo of Nora Schultz’s artwork, from her exhibition Parrot Tree, to my Instagram. The words “MACHINE DREAMING MIND” are cut out of a piece of fabric hanging from the rafters.

February 14, 2014
Nora Schultz’s Countdown performance is discussed in class. Slowly the artist and her assistants move through the exhibition space, detaching suspended works, cutting numbers 1-10 from them, laying each down on the ground, neatly in a row. This countdown is rote labor that borrows from a ritual reserved for endings and beginnings. To watch is to join the waiting and the anticipation. We are all working together. What are we going to find? What is next?
A countdown avoids a permanent feeling, forever.

February 16, 2014
I visit Parrot Tree a third time. I look up, crouch, bend, sit, stand on my tip-toes to find materials and shapes. It feels good to find and in this way surprise and unknowability create pleasure. Solveig Øvstebø writes that Nora Schultz “frees ‘things’ by disassociation, estranging them, removing them from their context so they can become: forms, colors, lines, themselves.”

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Recent works by Zhang suggest the experience of driving a car and dreaming. The viewer is confronted with speed, fuzz and placement. Contents of the paintings quote objects we all live with, but they feel memorialized in a way that is comforting and soft.

Car travel can be intentional or wandering. The driver does not need a passenger and scenery unfolds like sunlight on a blanket. Moving forward continuously, everything is always new: the light, the presentation, the wanting. This desire can feel like many different things at once and in Zhang’s work it could be a napkin folded into a swan or a jewelry store at night.

Similar to Nora Schultz’s suspended fabric pieces, Zhang’s use of negative space is always working and laboring, behaving as both the organ and the blade. Through shape and tonal puddles we are led to confusion. Is the surface overworked into erasure or barely worked at all? It could be a form or the shadow of a form. This ambiguity creates an emotional tenor uncommon in things like furniture, shoes and fruit. Not having to know what is top or bottom, coming or going, is the artist’s gift to us.

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Tags: Angela Ziqi Zhang, Chicago, Fleece Engine, Lower West Side, produce model