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zach teplin
COPY CATnovember 14, 2026 - january 09, 2027
“Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece,” William S. Burroughs wrote, bending Macbeth into something crude and holy. Teplin’s work lives near there, in the daily, lifelong attempt to see things as they truly are. Amidst distorted perceptions, systems that shape what we trust, and imagined thresholds, life’s still moments of limited certainty are both honored and challenged in this body of work.
Mirrors and shrines center the exhibition—in duality, agreement, and opposition. Vampirically empty, Teplin’s painted mirrors offer absent and faulty reflections, symptomatic of living inside an increasingly corporatocratic body. Either intact or fragmented, they embody radical statements of subversion, or coercive self-efficacy, of higher callings and rites of passage. These works snare our attention through veils, carnality, and devotion, ushering in understood truths, self-knowledge, and objective observation, yet refuse the traditional ambitions of illusionistic paintings. At once an artifice and copy that declines to disappear into what it copies, the artist remains less concerned with what mirrors show than with how they persuade us to trust what they represent. The work holds persuasion as both abstract concept and lived condition: an immediacy inhabiting unease, seduction, and skepticism. The copy is not a failure of the original. It’s the only available route to it.
Mimicry at different states, mimicry with different outcomes.
Shrines physically articulate this fantasy; portraits of relics and earthly delights valued above all else. They are meant to catch attention through veils, to offer carnality, to give devotions. In turn, they too skew and limit certainty and inherent purpose. Teplin’s vignettes of honor, remembrance, and memorial offer spiritual connectivity and a calling to higher powers through the inclusion of vices; a shot of liquor, a sheet of acid, a burning cigarette. A presence is felt, as is an emptiness.
Still, the exhibition commits to the opposite of cynicism. If mimicry can condition perception, can it also sharpen it? Does tribute survive us or preserve us? A refusal to reflect redirects the viewer toward the act of looking itself. Mimicry, here, is not deception but method.
featured works
Shrine for Defututa, 2026
Star Mirror 01, 2026
Mirror Triptych, 2026
Shrine for AM, 2026