GUT FEELINGS KATYA TEPPER AND RAHEL AIMA IN CONVERSATION 68

Hysteric Signs installation

views at White Columns, New
York, 2018. Courtesy: the artist
and White Columns, New York.
Photo: Marc Tatti

Medicore aesthetics meet compressed hair, expanding foam, and all

manner of leaky bodies in Katya Tepper’s mixed-media sculptures.
They menace without being belligerent; they’re violent in a friendly kind
of way. We speak here about reclaiming manufacturing and strip mall
landscapes, living and working with a chronic illness and the jaundiced
palette of sickness, and what happens when shit happens.

RAHEL AIMA
Let’s begin with your recent White Columns show, Hysteric Signs (2018).
KATYA TEPPER
The show consists of these four large wall constructions that are very bodied but not
figurative. They’re hypertactile, handmade with a layer of obsession and really exploring
found objects and manipulated materials. They all use industrial felt as a starting point.
I started using it because I was coming out of a ceramics practice, and it felt like slabs of clay
but also had an earthiness to it, because it’s compressed hair. So industrial felt to me is like
the body and industry in one, because it’s wool that’s been industrially processed.
I was thinking about large architectural signs in the strip mall landscape, big signs
that have funny legs. Or low-relief sculptures coming off of a building, like the grocery
store. I feel really attracted to those, because they’re like wall sculptures that also have a
graphic design to them. The work is a lot about digesting the landscape through the body.
And digestion is a theme that repeats itself in different ways through the show.
RA
There ’s something in the materiality of these works that feels very American. Maybe
it’s this sense of consuming the open landscape in a gallery setting.

How Does the External Shape Shape the Internal Shape (detail), 2017.
Courtesy: the artist and Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta

Opposite - Gaping Candle Tripod (detail), 2018.
Courtesy: the artist and White Columns, New York.
Photo: Marc Tatti
KT
Well, I like that idea of inside outness a lot, the internal body as a translator of the envi-
ronment. I think a lot about digestion because food is an obvious example of how the external
world moves through the body and comes out changed. I have what’s called an autoimmune
disease, but I consider it an altered immune disease. So I have a really sensitive relationship
to the environment, and one of the ways that my autoimmune stuff plays out is as a digestive
disease. It feels like I’m working out of a kind of gut consciousness. I try to infuse a lot of
movement, and I try to collaborate with materials. Even though there’s a lot of my hand in
the work, and there’s a lot of authorship, there’s also a lot of materials behaving on their own.
RA
I’m also curious about scale: of these intimated strip mall signage bodies as opposed to
the body that might be standing in front of them.
 GUT FEELINGS
69
R. AIMA
MOUSSE 66
70
K. TEPPER
 GUT FEELINGS
71
R. AIMA

KT
The presence that I want them to have is violent. Hovering over people in this way—
that is my attempt to reclaim scale from the industrial landscape. Moving through the world
with an autoimmune disease puts you in a state of chronic dysphoria. I’m interested in ex-
pressing some of that through imposing it onto other people with this hovering, to just
engulf the viewer. The one with the plungers really penetrates into the viewer’s space in
a way that is intentionally violating. A lot of the labor in these is actually very precious
By making them really large, it makes them less sentimental because it’s a lot of hand-
sewing and if they were small objects, they would mean something very different. I guess
that goes back to reclaiming things from the industrial landscape. Reclaiming manufactur-
ing, because my manufacturing actually takes place in a really domestic space. They become
really large, but they’re out of all these modular units. Because I’m chronically ill, I make
things from the couch a lot of the time. It’s a lot of really slow pieces coming together.
I have empathy for anything in physical space. The sculptures that I worked on are sup-
posed to feel simultaneously imposing but also very vulnerable, because they have all these
holes and a lot of the material on them is a skin that feels fragile.

Left - I, Infected, 2018. Courtesy: the artist and
White Columns, New York. Photo: Marc Tatti
Right -Gaping Candle Tripod, 2018. Courtesy: the
artist and White Columns, New York. Photo: Marc Tatti
Opposite - I, Infected (detail), 2018.
Courtesy: the artist and White Columns, New York
RA
Could you speak a little more about living with chronic illness?
KT
The world and the art world are not necessarily built for chronically ill and disabled
people, so I’m still learning how to navigate it. I’m in the United States, and we have a
failing health-care system. But I’m interested in the experience of pain and of healing.
For this show I was like “please don’t get a flare-up.” And then I got a flare-up. And I sat with
it, and I spent time with it, like “I’m not gonna be afraid of letting this imagery shape what
my work is.” I don’t have shame around my body’s functions and dysfunctions because those
seem to be the most basic things about how people operate. And that’s why there’s scatolog-
ical fascination through the found objects, through the plungers and toilet paper rolls.
I’m also really interested in taking what is termed grotesque and shifting it to a whimsical,
formal language. There’s a lot of visceral stuff happening in some of the sculptures—drippy,
messy stuff—and a lot of penetration, but I also try to make them feel like celebrations of qual-
ities related to sickness and related to a body that fails because every body eventually does fail.
RA
I also love the sense of whimsy—it’s not quite cartoonish, but there’s something playful
about it all. Perhaps palette plays in, the way you use color to frame or have background
washes on the wall.
KT
So the only mural colors in this show are different shades of beige, which is a way to
think about paint in an interior design sense. It’s specifically medical industrial complex col-
or, but also strip malls are just beige blocks. Beige has a really funny place in the manufac-
tured environment, because it’s supposedly calming, but it’s a really freaky, disconcerting
color in a lot of ways. And I wanted to use the natural color of certain materials to guide the
palettes, but at the same time I’m very much also dyeing cloth and applying color in differ-
ent ways. There ’s sort of an austere gray that unites everything, the gray of the industrial
felt. And different off-whites that are coming from different cloths and silicone caulk, which
is like a home repair material.
MOUSSE 66
72
K. TEPPER
 GUT FEELINGS
73
R. AIMA
 MOUSSE 66
74
K. TEPPER

RA
It’s funny because it’s used to patch up leaks, right?
KT
Yeah, totally. It’s a sealant. So I was using a lot of the inherent colors of different indus-
trial materials. Like the big plunger eye sculpture has this bright blue in it, and that’s just
nitrile medical gloves that I was cutting up and collaging. There ’s a lot of expansion foam.
I think of yellow, that’s the color of infection, so I think I was interested in various hints of
a sickly palette. But at the same time, I think Gaping Candle Tripod (2018) is the most color-
ful and in some ways the most earthy—I dyed a lot of felt in different browns and greens.
Each piece has its own specific palette, but they all have this red cloth. That’s another pretty
obvious funny color. I was thinking about bandages, a bit. I was just tacking cloth onto felt
using different adhesives but in a way that feels very fraudulent—it’s like peeling skin, like
a bandage. Color is a way for me to give something a mood.

Hysteric Sign (Ribbed Tomato‘n Grapes), 2018.

Courtesy: the artist and White Columns, New York.
Photo: Marc Tatti
And I think through each piece as graphic because they come from really graphic, car-
toony, playful drawings. Then I spend months translating them into these material, dimen-
sional pieces. But they start as drawings, and I think that is important because it speaks to the
way that I’m thinking about branding. We have internalized the graphic design of logos, and
that’s part of how I think about color. Color is very manipulative, it’s a way to seduce people.
RA
Do you relate this to your earlier ceramics practice? I just started a wheel-throwing
class, and it makes a lot of things legible in a very tactile way for me; it changed the way that
I see materials around me.

KT
I didn’t do any ceramics for this show, but ceramics was my gateway drug into making Left - Wall Bowl Constellation (1,2,3; Penetration
more dimensional material work. I came to clay because of how it preserves touch. I wasn’t with Rays; Olive Garden Restaurant; Sign) (detail),
2017. Courtesy: the artist and Species, Atlanta.
satisfied with painting, and I started to make sculptures around the form of a bowl, but I was Photo: Erin Jane Nelson
putting it on the wall. That spoke to gut feelings and anatomy. Like the space of a protruding Right - Horizon Slice, 2017 and Wall Bowl
Constellation (1,2,3; Penetration with Rays; Olive
stomach or empty stomach. And as I started to put the sculptures on the wall, I started to Garden Restaurant; Sign), 2017, installation view
paint around them, and it just exploded into this. at Species Atlanta, 2017. Courtesy: the artist
and Species, Atlanta. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson
Also, mutation is something that I’m really exploring formally, because I identify as a
mutant, as someone who’s been mutated. I make work in a lot of ways in a domestic setting.
That’s part of being chronically ill. I make work in isolation for the most part from a larger
artists’ community, even though the internet makes that not necessarily the case. It serves
me well for my own standards of what kind of artist I want to be, to spend a lot of time in my
own world. Yeah, leaving New York helped me find my own tempo and language.
 GUT FEELINGS
75
R. AIMA

RA
So what does it mean to live and work now in a more rural setting in Georgia?
KT
Well, I make this study of the strip mall landscape, because I’m not that interested in
romanticizing nature, because I don’t think there ’s any real wilderness left; I’m really con-
sciously making work about the Anthropocene. The strip mall landscape is a homogenizing
landscape. It actually looks the same basically everywhere, so that’s one reason I’m really
interested in it. What I see in Georgia and what I see in Pennsylvania and what I see in
California when I see a Home Depot or a Walmart: they all look exactly the same. The light
and the quality of the landscape surrounding it might be a little different, but at a certain
point, human intervention has created a really homogenized landscape. So that’s kind of
how I’m thinking about that conceptually.
But at the same time, I do get my hands dirty. I do spend time in a forest every day.
I’m fed through a kind of suburban mix of significantly more trees than I ever got to spend
time with in the city, but I’m really turning my gaze toward the man-made landscape of the
strip malls intentionally. It just resonates with me as something that has a relationship to the
way my body has changed because of the Anthropocene and because of industrial toxicity.
It’s also where food comes from, for most people—I’m really interested in how food is the
thing that we put into our bodies that gives us the most direct relationship to the outside
world. So I’m interested in what it means to shop for it and what that whole process looks
like, even though I also garden and stuff. Whatever whimsy and earthiness there is in my
work is very true to my ideals, but I try to not have an overly romantic pursuit of nature,
because I just don’t think that that’s what our world is ever going to look like again, and I’m Wall Bowl Constellation (1,2,3; Penetration with
Rays; Olive Garden Restaurant; Sign) (detail), 2017.
not interested in seeing backward that way. We ’re entangled in this industrialized landscape Courtesy: the artist and Species, Atlanta.
in ways that we can’t undo, and there’s no point in pretending that we can. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson

Katya Tepper (1987, South Florida) lives and works in Athens, Georgia. She earned a BFA from the Cooper Union
in 2010. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York (2018); Atlanta Contemporary
(2018); Species, Atlanta (2017), and The Hand, Brooklyn (2016). She has an upcoming show at the University of
Georgia, Athens (2019). Tepper is a recipient of the 2016 Wynn Newhouse Award and a 2017 MacDowell Fellowship.
Previous spread - Hysteric Sign (Distended J
Rahel Aima is a writer and editor from Dubai who is currently based in Brooklyn. She is working on a book about Bean) (detail), 2018. Courtesy: the artist and
color and futurity. White Columns, New York. Photo: Marc Tatti