Katz Tepper / Forests of fragments

Rack, Leaning, 2026. Wood, colored pencil on medical documents, deconstructed t-shirts, found scraps and remnants, found drawings and documents, colored pencil on deconstructed medical packaging, ginkgo leaves, ziplock bags, photocopies, tape, caulk, thread, quilting pens, wire. 100” H x 144” W x 12” D Photo credit: Mikey Mosher Photography

The artist Joseph Grigley lost his hearing at the age of ten, and has for decades made work in a range of media that respond to or reflect upon his disability. he is best known for his long-running Conversations works, in which he presents small handwritten notes that he and countless interlocutors made use of over the years in undertaking non-auditory communication. Grigley recently published a large archive documenting highlights of his public writing and speaking, including interviews and presentations on his art, as well as emails and letters related to disability discrimination. In one interview he stated, regarding the Conversations, “What was so crucial… was to find a way of sharing the experience of communicating, rather than simply narrate that experience.” In a more provocative mode he reflects, “What’s left is just this mass of fragments… and the discontinuity somehow creates a sense of desire.” Grigley categorizes his practice in part under the heading of rhopography, a term denoting the depiction of everyday, trivial subject matter. Initially used to classify a genre of still-life paintings focusing on mundane objects, Grigley and many other modern and contemporary artists have demonstrated that the idea can be extended to encompass an enormous variety of materials and approaches. 

Katz Tepper, Rack/Abacus/Bird’s Nest/Angel Wing 1-3 [installation view], 2026. Wood, used medical wrappers, found scraps and remnants, organic matter, caulk, quilting pins. 36” H x 5” W x 48” D (each). Photo credit: Mikey Mosher Photography

As an artist who similarly embraces the ambiguities and incongruities among humble ephemera, offering networks of resonant interaction, Katz Tepper has spent the last ten years making work that reflects their experiences of chronic illness, queerness, and complex, shifting embodiment through the practice of assembling. In their airy sculptures, dowels, fabric, wire, caulk, pins, tape, and thread provide fragile supports on which to display salvaged artifacts including handwritten notes (a la Grigley), as well as Ziploc bags, pebbles, pencil shavings, leaves, printouts, cigarette butts, plastic packaging, disposable medical items, insect husks, and pages from their symptoms journal, among other insubstantial remnants.

Pharmacy Receipts [installation view], 2025. Deconstructed t-shirts, wood, die-cast-end steel cables, documents, ephemera, detritus, organic matter, plumbing hardware, tape, thread, caulk, colored pencil. Photo credit: Prairie, Chicago

“Playing with found objects to me is also always playing with a social language,” they told me. “I collect a lot of my neighbors’ garbage… That feels like a way of being in relation with everyone around me, that makes sense to me.” Tepper shared with me that they feel a connection between their practice and that of their paternal grandmother, who made dolls from used bottles and bottle-caps, scrap fabric, and any number of cast-off extraneous items she came across. Tepper made connections to their formative experiences spending time with these objects, before ever seeing art in institutional contexts.

As I was rehearsing how I would talk about some of the materials that I scavenge, save, and sort, I

noticed that I felt some resistance to describing them in intellectual terms, such as around value and

surplus. Of course those terms are relevant to how these materials live in the world, but I really think of

these materials as my friends a lot of the time, as company. I have an amicable relationship, even a

spiritual relationship, with these discards. With the little beat up scraps, the used up things. I’m guided

by my affinity. And then, some of my materials are my enemies, like bureaucratic documents, and I work

against them.

Zipper From a Smaller Time Shirt (“monarch butterfly flew very close to me”; “You owe $400”) [detail], 2025. Cotton t-shirt, hardwood dowels, masking tape, packing tape, silicon caulk, thread, quilting pins, felt moving blanket, polyester felt rug-underlay, Kevlar felt sample, kid’s jacket remnant with metal zipper, steel wire, steel eyehook, fishing line, ziplock bags, drywall dust, wood dust, other dust, syringes and their wrappers, luer-lock needles and their wrappers, fiberglass insulation, 1970s upholstery foam ripped up by dog, crayon drawing fragment, oil pastel, colored pencil, newsprint, marker, alcohol swab with blood stain, alcohol swab wrappers, spray foam fragments, seeds, fabric soaked in foam and ripped up from industrial wool felt, band-aid wrapper, dirty government document, medical bill, aluminum foil remnants, ginkgo leaves, Xeroform packet, die-cast-end steel cables. Photo credit: Prairie, Chicago

These relations with overlooked and discarded minutiae inform their sense of connection and purpose. “I feel strongly that materials are animate, that there is energetic charge in every scrap, every document. I'm called to move through my personal journey in this world through experimental art making sometimes, to interact with those energies on what might be called non-normative terms” they said. “It really helps me with living.”

That's where it becomes funny for me to narrate my practice in the language of discourse. I feel some

resistance to overdetermining or making claims about what the work is, what it does. I can narrate my

personal curiosities and motivations. But I’m most interested in the language that the work generates for

itself. The materials list is the terms of the work. It’s a poetics, a cosmology. “Cicada shells, injection

wrappers, quilting pins, medical documents, used-up foam thing.” As is the visual description.

Describing the work generates language about the work’s orientations: fragile, precarious, discarded,

inserted, pinned, taped, re-arranged, fragmented, leaning, resting… 

Cicadas on CVS Pharmacy Receipt 1 [detail], 2025. Photocopy, colored pencil, 8.5" H x 11" W. Photo credit: Prairie, Chicago

Grigley asserts that his handwritten matrices offer him “an opportunity to combine the evanescene of everyday speech with the tradition of the still-life painting.” In keeping with the origin of rhopography, the practice of still-life also deeply informs Tepper’s work. Along with presenting networks of objects as sculptural assemblages, Tepper has spent years making observational drawings of objects in their environment, and more recently, printing and then embellishing images of items arranged on a flatbed scanner, a surface they describe as being like “a stage, or an altar.” 

The objects that I'm drawing observationally are the objects that are piling up on my coffee table, mostly

objects that are indexing bodily maintenance as well as bodily re-invention. I sit on the couch and draw

what’s in front of me. It’s a meditative ritual. And it'll often be medications, injection supplies, pill

bottles, and then books, notebooks, and texts. I'm interested in a slippery space of engaging medicine

with a lot of ambivalence and playfulness, and then also treating the scene as a place of study, and a kind

of erotics of the everyday. Substances and texts that enter a body and change it. And maybe suggest that

the ways the body is written can be re-written.

Still Life drawings, 2024 - 2026. Oil pastel and colored pencil on paper, 9” x 12” each, plus frames. Photo credit: Mikey Mosher Photography

On a trip to Italy they were able to visit a museum in Bologna dedicated to the work of Giorgio Morandi. Tepper relates Morandi’s consistent practice of repeatedly painting the same household vessels to the precise daily ritual enacted for decades by artist On Kawara in making paintings that recorded the date in an unchanging white sans-serif font. While appreciating observational drawing as a practice of patience and meditative attention related to the crip time of slowness, pain, fatigue, and bureaucratic delay, Tepper also sees these representations as a way of representing ill, disabled, queer and trans embodiment “outside of figuration.” “All of these objects and materials become sorts of bodily indexes,” they told me, “without directly representing figures.”

Instead, embodiment is configured as dependent on and co-constituted by a constellation of stuff, forces, systems. As contingent, dispersed, porous. These objects also mark time in specific ways. ‘AM/PM.

Weekly. Every other week.’ But the piles on the coffee table involve excess, disarray, scrambling.

Rectilinear time gets distorted. And making the drawings makes time slow, stretchy. Rituals make time

more sensuous.

An ambitious publication project Tepper is working on, Easy Touch: Still Lives, will document both their writing and their still-life practice through visual and tactile surfaces. “In these still lives, the couch is the studio," they said. "It's a reclining and domestic practice. I want to find a form for these drawings to come to people on their couches, to be experienced reclining, resting. And to not privilege an exclusively sighted audience, when what I connect with most about drawing is touch. Drawing as a form of touching from a distance.” 

From the series Still Life drawings, 2024 - 2026. Oil pastel and colored pencil on paper. 9” x 12”, plus frame. Photo credit: Mikey Mosher Photography

A recurring motif in rhopgraphic Dutch still life paintings that resonates with Tepper is the image of a discarded lemon peel. “I feel a material magnetism to things…”, they said, “that have a story already inside of them, because they’ve been through something.”

I'm also thinking about it just as this object with a beautiful kind of pathos embedded in it. I've

incorporated used-up eggshells in sculptures before. Lately I’ve been saving a lot of cicada shells. The

discarded container, the spent skin, is interesting to me. A trace of something that was once intact and is

no longer. I’ve been using the cicada shells  in printmaking drawings and in sculptures. There's

something about the husk, the leftover, the shell that I'm really drawn to. With the cicada shells, in

particular, there’s a beautifully non-normative, non-linear temporal cycle imbued in them. I’ve been

repurposing injection wrappers to encase the cicada shells. It becomes a kind of double negative.

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Rack/Abacus/Bird’s Nest/Angel Wing 2 (details), 2026.

The French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok offer an interesting perspective on the psychic symbolism of shells. In their collection The Shell and the Kernel, Abraham and Torok present a literary analysis focused on traumatic secrets, often related to intergenerational trauma, buried and inaccessible to direct expression in language but sometimes revealed through symptoms. Created during the COVID lockdown, Tepper’s video Roasted Cockroach for Scale presents recordings of scripted and improvised video call conversations between the artist and their father, reworked through screen recordings that document the artist’s ecstatic exploration of Google applications in tandem with the transcription platform Otter.ai. In this video, words are multiplied and distorted across ever-shifting templates that recall the preserved detritus he depicts and displays within layers or filters of containment, as well as the fragments of conversation in Grigley’s Conversations. The vivid VHS-era “video blue” color plays a prominent role in the video, filling a blank window that moves around in order to cover and reveal text. Tepper told me that that this also nods to Derek Jarman’s Blue, an experimental film denoting the director’s loss of vision in his last months before dying of complications related to AIDS. 

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Roasted Cockroach for Scale [installation view], 2022. Digital video projection with sound, carpet, lounging pillows. 47:06 minutes. Photo credit: Laurel Gitlen, NYC

Video blue is also a motif in a new book Tepper co-edited with fellow artist Mo Costello, which was recently published with Soberscove Press.  Beverly Buchanan, Athens, GA, 8 July 1995: A video by Judith McWillie translates and poetically interprets an unedited two hour video with the aforementioned artists, through an edited transcription, broken up into scenes, illustrated with video stills, and annotated with contextual information. Tepper shared:

Transcription is a kind of love-language for me. It’s a way of being with everyday speech, its textures and

rhythms, and insisting that these have value as literature. Disabled artists, or artists working with access

practices as material and form, have been doing critical work around the radical potential of captioning

for some time. I felt inspired by and responsive to that with the treatment of text in my own videos,

which are kind of multi-media poems layering transcribed or captioned speech and script. More recently, I’ve come into community with experimental novelists taking up transcription, and it’s really resonated

with me, this potency of language generated in speech. This book lingers on an extraordinary found video

that emerged in a wider collaborative research project, and it privileges slowing down and staying with

the informal dialogue between these two artists, at times meandering, outrageous, interrupted. The essay

I wrote for the book argues that this informal ‘oral history’, which touches on really specific contexts of

southernness, anti-blackness, and the violent construction of “insider” and “outsider” art, be taken up as

counter-history.

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Image of Costello and Tepper's Soberscove book and a “behind the scenes” process image from that transcription process.

Along with Costello, Tepper also co-curated an exhibition, Beverly’s Athens, which opened in January 2026 at the Athenaeum in Athens, GA, platforming lesser known elements of Buchanan’s practice from the twenty three years she lived in that city. The exhibition foregrounded a significant amount of Buchanan’s ephemera, including sketches, notes, and gifts focused on her local community. Known primarily for her sculptures representing Southern shacks, Buchanan was an ill Black artist who had gallery representation in New York but who lived and worked for much of her career in Athens, Georgia, where Tepper lived when they became involved in the research, and where Costello is still based. 

A Shared Language Shirt (Me, Dad, and B), 2025. Deconstructed cotton t-shirt, wood, die-cast-end steel cables, photocopies, colored pencil, masking tape, drywall tape, packing tape, caulk, thread, quilting pins, wire, fishing line, ziplock bags, plastic Deli bag, Post-It notes, candy wrapper, paper fragment, rubber fragment, red plastic unknown bits, unraveled cassette tape, leaves, seeds, binder clip, sanding sponge, industrial wool felt, PVC plumbing joint, Ricola wrapper, cicada shells, dirty absorbent rolled up thing. 54” H x 44” W x 5” D Photo credit: Prairie, Chicago

Concurrent with this research, Tepper became increasingly intentional about archiving their own ephemera and documents, alongside those of their father and found documents on the streets of their neighborhood. In Tepper’s 2025 solo exhibition at Prairie in Chicago, Pharmacy Receipts, some of the documents on display in Tepper’s assemblages included actual pharmacy receipts, transactions which signal the arbitrary constraints that actuarial and financial logics put on their ability, as well as that of innumerable others, to maintain a tolerable quality of life. Bureaucratic medical documents also layer across the installation. However, Tepper resists the readymade as a simple autonomous signifier. “Body as data is a really specific language that can feel very violent,” Tepper said. “So I've been coloring those with a kind of whimsical doodling. Insisting on nonsense and pleasure.” Notably, the exhibition text that Tepper wrote to accompany the installation begins with an anecdote about medication receipts that Tepper found in the sketchbooks of Chicago artist Roger Brown, another artist with AIDS who passed away in 1997.

Pharmacy Receipts [installation view], 2025. Deconstructed t-shirts, wood, die-cast-end steel cables, documents, ephemera, detritus, organic matter, plumbing hardware, tape, thread, caulk, colored pencil. Photo credit: Prairie, Chicago

Multiple ways of reading and interpreting visual collections in space is key to Joseph Grigley’s Conversations, much as it is to Tepper’s enigmatic arrangements. Grigley comments,

As Josef Albers said about color relations, you cannot put one color beside another without also changing

both. This is also true for verbal narratives; you cannot put one word beside another without also

changing both.

Grigley also said in an interview, “Deep down inside, I’m fundamentally a bricoleur—I like puttering and tinkering around.” For their part, Tepper sees their assemblages as modular archives which imply the possibility of being disassembled and reassembled in new configurations, offering new contemplative experiences. In addition, this modularity provides practical affordances. “I've been trying to make works that require very little muscle and are extremely lightweight and have an ease built into their formal language,” they explained. “(The assemblages) become spatial in this way that feels like a kite,” they told me. “They can sort of spread out. But then it can also fold, they could be disassembled and travel very small, in a tube.” They cite a point of inspiration in Marcel Duchamp’s suitcase exhibitions, which Tepper saw in an exhibition at the Art Institute in Chicago, and which the wall text contextualized as having been created in the context of needing to flee during wartime.

Rack/Abacus/Bird’s Nest/Angel Wing 2 [installation view], 2026. Wood, used medical wrappers, found scraps and remnants, organic matter, caulk, quilting pins. 36” H x 5” W x 48” D Photo credit: Mikey Mosher Photography

As for their own itinerant artmaking, they reflected,

Some of my personal goals with my practice are for sculpture to weigh me down less, and to be able to

make sculpture on the go, or, not to be too dramatic, but on the run. Not so literally,  but as part of the

work’s ethos, or aura, or orientation. This in part has to do with contending with the ways I've actually

been weighed down by some of the things I've made. By my impulse to accumulate. My attraction to

density and excess.

As I prepared to leave the south to move to Chicago in 2024, following a difficult experience related to

scarcity in trans healthcare infrastructure to be frank, I had to contend with this problem. Shedding and

moving was transformative. Over time, my touch is getting lighter and lighter. Forms are becoming more

airy. My spirit is shifting, and it’s happening in parallel to, and in response to, climate catastrophe and

fascistic and genocidal world order. To crisis conditions.

In 2020, during Covid lockdown, I completely dematerialized my practice and worked primarily in video

for the next three years, with just a computer and a cellphone as my tools. In that process, writing

became a big part of my practice, invaluably economic in means and expansive in what it can do. I’ll soon

be starting a writing fellowship focused on Transgenre. There is much for me to experiment with in

language directly. And with sculpture, I hope that the next installation I put together evokes a feeling of

little bits scattering in the wind. Scraps in movement towards becoming a nest, or unraveling one,

simultaneously. 

In writing on the significance of trauma, melancholy, and shame in queer culture, Heather Love proposes, in a parallel spirit:

One may enter the mainstream on the condition that one breaks ties with all those who cannot make it

—the nonwhite and the nonmonogamous, the poor and the genderdeviant, the fat, the disabled, the

unemployed, the infected, and a host of unmentionable others.

Evoking Tepper’s visual archives, Love declares: “To reconstruct the past, we build on ruins; to bring to life, we chase after the fugitive dead.” Dwelling in an affective poetic register, Tepper uses discarded matter, tangible and virtual, surplus and functional, to hint at experiences of grief and interdependence in many contexts, at many scales. Reminiscent of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Tepper offers in their dense and delicate webs and tableaus an intuitive model for iteratively re-mapping pathos through historical time, using an accessible fugitive ritual of protection and preservation.

Rack, Leaning (detail), 2026. Wood, colored pencil on medical documents, deconstructed t-shirts, found scraps and remnants, found drawings and documents, colored pencil on deconstructed medical packaging, ginkgo leaves, ziplock bags, photocopies, tape, caulk, thread, quilting pens, wire. 100” H x 144” W x 12” D Photo credit: Mikey Mosher Photography