ARTIST STATEMENT (WINTER 2025/26)
My work explores the nature of learning and discovery, stressing that curiosity, risk, and most important, play, are fundamentally essential for comprehending the world. Meaningful learning materializes in moments where calculated risk is prioritized over safety, and where mistakes and surprises are crucial steps toward insight. I wish to invite engagement and evoke a sense of kinship through shared ideas and sometimes humor. My entire creative process begins with daily drawing in my handmade sketchbooks, utilizing paper as an inexpensive substrate where many versions are able to exist one after the other. This approach, evolving through a constant iteration of ideas, ultimately informs the development of new pieces. I celebrate the joyful tension of discovery, aiming to connect us through the recognition of the universal weirdness inherent in seeking understanding.
Growing up unsupervised I was drawn to testing boundaries, and each experiment, regardless of outcome, taught me about risk, consequence, and the joy of discovery. These revelations were fundamental to understanding cause and effect and calculating risk while maintaining childhood curiosity.
To capture these moments and explore these complex themes, I work with drawing, watercolor, and India ink, creating works on paper that range in size from intimate 5" x 7" drawings to larger pieces reaching 8 feet wide. I also construct inert "fireworks" from paper, fuse and glassine. These sculptural elements, devoid of any explosive potential, serve as metaphors for the controlled exploration of risk, the excitement of potential chaotic energy.
Today, my artistic practice serves as a bridge between these formative experiences and my adult understanding of their significance. Through my work, I seek to capture that precise moment when a child's eyes widen with potential, when the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary. My pieces often incorporate elements that seem to teeter on the edge of reality - familiar objects reimagined through the lens of youthful imagination, where everyday items become portals to fantastic possibilities.
The tension between safety and discovery remains a central theme in my work. I'm fascinated by how children naturally navigate this balance, often with more wisdom than we give them credit for. My drawings and sculptures frequently play with scale and perspective, creating environments that evoke both the physical and emotional landscape of childhood experimentation.
Through my art, I invite viewers to reconnect with their own memories of childhood daring, to remember the electric thrill of pushing boundaries and the profound learning that comes from testing limits. Each piece serves as a reminder that growth often happens in that exhilarating space between caution and courage, where curiosity leads the way and discovery awaits those brave enough to explore.
BIOGRAPHY
Scott Teplin was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin but has been living in New York City since 1995. While he largely avoided art classes as a young student, he began to shape his creative identity in his teens through boundary testing endeavors like dissecting fireworks, then creating new ones and making his own clothes. These early playful, imaginative, and sometimes risky pursuits continue to inform his work today.
Discovering the medium of watercolor during a year of study in Europe was transformative for Teplin. This set him on a path that gained footing through earning a BS degree in Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an MFA in printmaking at University of Washington.
Teplin has exhibited world-wide in Museums and commercial galleries since 1998. His work is included in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art (NY and SF), The New Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Spencer Art Museum, Walker Art Center, Smithsonian Institution, Altoids Collection, New York Public Library, Phoenix Public Library, MIT, University of Virginia, Cornell University, Harvard University, Yale University, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Wesleyan University, Stanford University, The California College of Arts and Crafts, University of Iowa, Occidental College, Johns Hopkins Children's Hospital, Turku University Hospital - Finland, Penn and Teller, and Progressive Insurance.
ISOMETRIC
This drawing series, which originated in the early 1990s, employs the isometric perspective not for realism, but as a vehicle for conceptual exploration. Each drawing begins with an object that dictates the initial construction of walls and rooms. My creative process is a form of play, first adhering strictly to a defined set of rules such as maintaining scale, fixed wall heights, and consistent angles. Yet, as the drawing develops, these guiding constraints are strategically broken down, allowing for the spontaneous formation of new visual ideas and images.
My crash drawings start with news photos: explosions, crashes and accidents which I collage together. I then use the collage as a reference to make line drawings. Those line drawings are again collaged together several more times in order to complete a final drawing. Catalog available.
FIREWORKS
The unlit firework embodies potential energy: ephemeral, exquisitely designed, and inherently unpredictable. As a child, I was drawn not only to their unique, sometimes amateurish label design but to the visceral, secret thrill of possession. Collecting them and holding this dangerous object in my room, unbeknownst to my parents, offered a tangible, intoxicating sense of control and responsibility over a potent force. This intimate fascination with the unignited state was the starting point for my artistic methodology. My early artistic practice was a literal deconstruction. Driven by the limited ways to "play," I would secretly disassemble my collection, combining existing powders and cardboard tubes to create novel, imaginative charges. This impulse to dissect and reconstruct a predefined potential led me to the core questions that now drive my work: How do we navigate the delicate territory between childhood wonder and the edges of danger? What transforms a hazard into an opportunity for profound discovery? These backyard experiments were not just rebellion; they were foundational inquiries. Catalog available.
BOTANICAL
My botanical series explores the interplay between order and chaos, mutation and evolution. I depict fantastical flowers set against backgrounds that use a system of grids as a framework. Established order is broken allowing for unpredictable results to emerge. The tension between the rigid grid and the organic, mutated flowers invites the viewer to contemplate the balance between the planned and the spontaneous. By layering these mutated flowers over the systematically created backgrounds, parallels between the creative process and the mechanisms of evolutionary adaptation emerge
CRASH
