Wall Works is a new series where we invite an artist to create a site-specific wall installation in the Plaza Gallery. Katya Tepper's Hysteric Sign (Ribbed Tomato 'n Grapes) is a large scale, clunky wall sculpture that initially resembles the oversized road signs that loom over the American landscape. Like the architectural signs of strip malls and billboards, this sculpture claims and...
Wall Works is a new series where we invite an artist to create a site-specific wall installation in the Plaza Gallery. Katya Tepper’s Hysteric Sign (Ribbed Tomato ‘n Grapes) is a large scale, clunky wall sculpture that initially resembles the oversized road signs that loom over the American landscape. Like the architectural signs of strip malls and billboards, this sculpture claims and marks space as a frontal design, with bold colors and graphic shapes related to painting. Upon closer inspection, it reveals a dizzying and layered sculptural language defined by holes. The materials interweave, exposing an infrastructure of entangled networks, processes, and objects. Plastic thread spools plug surfaces of caulk and cloth, while silicon brushstrokes are pinned to industrial felt shapes as if there is something violent and insistent about its being, this large ‘sign’ refuses to differentiate between internal and external. Deliberately heavy-handed but equally playful, Hysteric Sign (Ribbed Tomato ‘n Grapes) celebrates the irregular, nonsensical, unruly, raw, and screaming.
Katya Tepper (b. 1987, South Florida) lives and works in Athens, GA. Tepper earned a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2010. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at White Columns, New York (2018), Atlanta Contemporary (2018), Species, Atlanta (2017), and The Hand, Brooklyn (2016). She is a recipient of the 2016 Wynn Newhouse Award and a 2017 MacDowell Fellowship.
