Katz Tepper

In 2009, I visited the preserved home of Roger Brown and had a formative experience going through his sketchbooks in chronological order. In my memory, the sketchbooks were filled with tightly composed thumbnail sketches for his paintings, neatly drawn in compact, perfect rectangles. As I flipped through these exquisite ideations, I was struck to find the artist’s pharmacy receipts, wedged between pages like bookmarks. The receipts listed the medications he was taking and their accompanying prices, charting the artist’s medical maintenance as he lived with and ultimately died from AIDS-related-complications. As the receipts accumulated, the sketches dwindled.

I have since come to admit I care more about the pharmacy-receipt-ridden-sketchbooks than I do the autonomous painting. The pharmacy receipts signal the body’s dependencies, its open and responsive systems, its interwovenness with hostile systems. Its situatedness in time and place and the attendant prevailing logics, beliefs, and value systems that govern “healthcare”, as in, people’s lives. Maybe I care so much about seeing an artist’s pharmacy receipts because I reckon with the mysterious impulse to make and re-assemble things with my hands, and having my (aching, swollen) hands full with pharmacy receipts. And I’m tired of the context notes only coming after, if ever at all. I’m far too absorbent and tired to pretend otherwise: the context is the stuff.

Here’s a pharmacy receipt story: One of my medications costs $6,300.33 a month without health insurance coverage. I have had to change health insurance three times in one year since starting this medication. Each time I change health insurance, the insurance plan denies coverage of my medication before a lengthy back and forth of ‘prior authorization’, in which my doctors are asked to prove, through my bodily data, that I’m sick enough to deserve the care. This spring, insurance deemed this medication ‘nonessential’ even after it was ‘pre-authorized’. I had to first exhaust AbbVie Inc.’s Manufacturer’s Savings Program before Blue Cross Blue Shield’s CVS Caremark’s Prudent RX’s coverage would kick in and lower the $1,932.63 copay. Most weeks I spend many hours on patient portals and on the phone with giant corporations learning terms like ‘lower site of care’.

Bernadette Mayer wrote “I learn to deny desire from an acquired habit of vigilant fear”. This world has required us to be hard, and yet – deep time reveals that rocks are extremely squishy. Pharmacy receipts also speak of a person’s, a person’s body’s, endless adaptability. Merging with pills, injections, infusions, surgeries, transmitting through blood, digestion, veins, portals, routing into signals and webs. I’m in awe of being hosted by this malleable and interconnected organism of organisms, its wild impulses, contradictory needs and desires, its unruliness and resistance to containment. The pharmacy receipts in the sketchbooks are an extension of a body’s boundlessness, and the sketches themselves: bodily deposits.

At a certain point of seeing stuff this way, everything becomes connected. Everything is a receipt, an artifact, a chronicle, an archive. I catalog the remnants and detritus and extensions – copy them, cut them up, put them back together. I am committed to staying enchanted, and I am committed to leaving a record. Perhaps nurturing a chaotic imagination is one way to survive.

– Katz Tepper

Installation view

Make-Shift Archive 2 (Ricola wrappers), 2025
hardwood dowels, cotton t-shirts, masking tape, drywall tape, silicon caulk, wood glue, thread, embroidery thread, quilting pins, steel wire, ziplock bags, wood dust, silicon rubber plumbing gaskets, fiberglass insulation, lint, sticks, Ricola wrappers, printer paper, toner, colored pencil, USB cable, headphone cable, run over water bottle, grass + flowers with primer paint from mural, twist tie, eroded envelopes, Takeda envelope, Aetna envelope, envelope fragment, cardboard fragment, latex rubber tubing, PVC rubber tube, cicadashell

Installation view

A Shared Language Shirt (me, dad, and B), 2025
cotton t-shirt, hardwood dowels, masking tape, drywall tape, packing tape, silicon caulk, thread, quilting pins, steel 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, plastic, sanding sponge, printer paper, toner, colored pencil, industrial wool felt, PVC plumbing joint, Ricola wrapper, cicada shells, dirty absorbent rolled up thing, die-cast-end steel cables

Installation view

8 o’ Clock Poem Shirt (“URGENT” x3), 2025
cotton t-shirt, hardwood dowels, stick, masking tape, drywall tape, packing tape, electrical tape, silicon caulk, epoxy, thread, quilting pins, ziplock bag, feather, run-over cardboard box, cardboard tube, eroded journal, paper, pen, plastic, leaves, seeds, twist ties, alcohol swabs, printer paper, toner, colored pencil, industrial wool felt

Installation view

Zipper From a Smaller Time Shirt (“monarch butterfly flew very close to me”; “You owe $400”), 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

Installation view

Make-Shift Archive 1 (MyChart & Easy●Touch), 2025
hardwood dowels, cotton t-shirts, masking tape, packing tape, drywall tape, electrical tape, silicon caulk, thread, quilting pins, steel wire, ziplock bags, ginkgo leaves, other leaves, sticks, string, needle wrappers, syringe wrappers, suppository wrapper, suppository inserters, clothespin, foam fragments, plastic fragments, feather, paper scraps, printer paper, eroded paper, paper towel, toner, journal paper, pen, colored pencil, aluminum foil remnants, found band-aid, silicon rubber plumbing gaskets with silver paint marker, rubber cable, volcanic rock

Installation view

Front: Maintenance Shirt/Erosion Shirt (RECTUM notes), 2025
cotton t-shirt, hardwood dowel, masking tape, packing tape, silicon caulk, thread, quilting pins, printer paper, toner, colored pencil, industrial wool felt, felt moving blanket, silicon rubber plumbing gaskets with silver paint marker, plastic pouch with unnameable protrusion, plastic bag with sharpie and sticker, lint, dirt, die-cast-end steel cables

Back: Pattern Recognition Shirt (destroyed tissue box), 2025
cotton t-shirt, hardwood dowels, masking tape, drywall tape, latex rubber tubing, silicon caulk, thread, quilting pins, printer paper, toner, colored pencil, run-over and eroded tissue box and fragments, eroding crayon drawing fragment, plastic pouch, car air-freshener fragment, die-cast-end steel cables

Installation view

Angel Bandaid 2 (with Icecream Imprint, Ginkgo Leaves, Ricola Wrappers, Rinvoq, Doxycycline, Fish Oil Capsules, Vitamin C Tablet, Turmeric Tablet, Vitamin D Capsule, Rubber Bands, Electric Tape), 2025
toner and colored pencil on printer paper, metal frame

Angel Bandaid 1 (with Front + Back Triple Chocolate Snickers Icecream Imprint and Ginkgo Leaves), 2025
toner and colored pencil on printer paper, metal frame

Swirl (Doubled Angel Bandaid 2), 2025
toner and colored pencil on printer paper, metal frame

Katz Tepper (b. 1987, Lake Worth, Florida) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Chicago. Solo exhibitions include White Columns, NY; Atlanta Contemporary, GA; Cushionworks, SF; Laurel Gitlen, NY; and a forthcoming exhibition at Third Born, Mexico City. Group exhibitions and screenings include the Tang Teaching Museum, NY; Fluentum, Berlin; British Film Institute Southbank, London; and Red Bull Arts, Detroit. Fellowships and residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing, MacDowell, Writer-in-Residence at Writing Space Chicago, and Artist-in-Residence with Luka Carter at DuPage College. Alongside co-curator Mo Costello, Tepper received a 2024 Teiger Foundation grant for their curatorial research on Beverly Buchanan, which will culminate in an exhibition at the Athenaeum, GA, opening January 2026, and a forthcoming book with Soberscove Press. Tepper received their BFA from Cooper Union, and their MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.