Teela Misa DeLeón

Artist Statement

This project begins as a study of silence as form. In certain languages there are characters or letters for the spaces between words. Silence is often considered as a waiting emptiness, an incomplete or neutral blankness. Yet, like these spaces between words, silences are alive in their own right and give shape to all sound and meaning.
What gets overlooked in these spaces can show us something about how power misreads the world. This resonates too with the lived experience of illegibility—of identities that do not conform to fixed categories. What is considered illegible is, in fact, deeply present.

Artist Bio

Teela Misa DeLeón is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Olympia, Washington. They work primarily with experimental large-format photography and alternative process printmaking to explore perception, relationality, and transformation.
Rooted in patient and process-driven approaches, their work engages with in-between spaces—between document and dream, presence and absence, between what is seen and what resists visibility.
DeLeón studied Gender and Sexuality, Critical Theory, Psychology, and Visual Arts at UC Santa Cruz and Evergreen State College, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Dreaming of a Fisherman's Wife, Legible Silences, 2021