Katz Tepper
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2023
1987
United States
Laurel Gitlen
"The work contains countless paradoxes. And one reason for its improbable successes is its ability to hold many paradoxes at the same time. It is somehow literal, abstract, personal, familial, bodily, political, sociological, emotional, first person, shared person, epistolary, scripted, improvisational, tender, gross, banal, and revelatory."
- Jordan Stein, interview with Corrine Fitzpatrick, Cushion Works, San Francisco (2022)
Katz Tepper is an interdisciplinary artist engaging a poetics of porosity. Their recent video works layer and loop processes of recording, transcribing, and performance with crudely manipulated technologies within the formal framework of cellphone and desktop logics. This shifting landscape of remote communication destabilizes fixed boundaries around identity, authorship and linear time, synthesizing in emotionally complex registers as they collaborate with their father.
Roasted Cockroach for Scale, Laurel Gitlen, New York, 2023. Photo: Charles Benton
♫ War is Everywhere ♫ a collaborat- weaves together material generated through an ongoing relational experiment with Tepper's father, exploring habits and systems of consumption, communication, and care within/against the backdrop of rising fascism and climate catastrophe. Invested in the textures of everyday life and constellations of place, the video is composed of their media exchanges spanning text messages, scripted zoom performance rehearsals, AI transcriptions, and clumsy POV cell phone recordings in doctor’s offices, on the couch watching the news, and from across th ...
"There's a quality of 'homemade-ness' that feels like a commitment to a certain kind of complexity and richness of everyday materiality, a certain kind of erotics even, something that doesn't need 'higher' production value because it is so deeply attentive to the materiality of what it is - and all of that with a razor sharp thinking sensibility and editing sensibility that composes everything in cutting, moving, and also super funny ways."
- Bill Deitz, in conversation with Katz Tepper (2023)
"Being a poet, I do look at it as poetry. In some ways portions of it look like a new kind of concrete poetry, particularly when [they] have [their] father sound out words with a huge circle in the middle of the screen, that reminded me a lot of sound poetry and concrete poetry. It’s really a 19th and 20th century phenomena that the word becomes an image, so this distinction between word and image is defeated by technology over and over again and increasingly so with the new interfaces that we use daily."
- Gregg Bordowitz, in conversation with Katz Tepper, Roasted Cockroach for Scale ...
Katz Tepper (b 1987 FL, lives and works in GA) has had recent solo exhibitions with Cushion Works, San Francisco; White Columns, New York, and Atlanta Contemporary, Georgia. Their work has been included in group exhibitions at Fluentum, Berlin, Red Bull Arts Detroit, and the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Tepper earned an MFA from the Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College, and a BFA from Cooper Union. They have attended residencies at Macdowell and Skowhegan School of Art, are a current fellow with the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, and are a recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award, along with a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
