Roasted Cockroach for Scale still. Digital video with color and sound, 47 minutes, 2022. [Video still of a tightly zoomed and cropped transcription. The text reads “country, I I feel a void.” “void” is highlighted.]

Cushion Works is pleased to present Roasted Cockroach for Scale, Katz Tepper’s first west coast exhibition.

Made in collaboration with the artist’s Soviet-Israeli-American father, Roasted Cockroach for Scale is a fragmentary portrait of a transnational and transgenerational relationship. Calibrated to the specific qualities of remote communication in the global viral pandemic, the film consists entirely of text-based screen recordings created using Google, Zoom, and AI-speech-to-text software. Playful and tender interactions between the filmmaker and their father activate a web of narrative, formal, and political connections between disability and diaspora in this improbable film, which orbits themes of illness, memory, genocide, displacement, militarism, statehood, and ableism. [laughter]

Roasted Cockroach for Scale begins on the hour and runs for 47 minutes. The video includes captions and is available remotely.

Katz Tepper is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, text, installation, and sculpture. Their work has been presented in solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York and Atlanta Contemporary, Georgia, and in group shows including “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” at Red Bull Arts, Detroit and “A Fence Around the Torah: Safety and Unsafety in Jewish Life” at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Their work has been featured in Mousse Magazine, Art in America, Art Papers, Art Review, and Burnaway. Tepper was born and raised in Florida and is based in Athens, GA. They are a recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, an FCA Bridge Fund Grant, and will be in residence at Skowhegan this summer. They earned a BFA from the Cooper Union and an MFA from Bard College.

Masks are required at Cushion Works.

Cushion Works is wheelchair accessible; the bathroom is not. Please be in touch with access requests and related questions.

Further reading and listening:
Katz Tepper & Gregg Bordowitz in Conversation
Katz Tepper & Maia Ipp in Conversation
ArtNews: Katz Tepper’s Hysteric Signs and Roasted Cockroach for Scale