Teela DeLeón

Olympia, Washington

I work with photography as a way to hold proximity, the residue of memory, and tensions of meaning without needing to resolve them. My images move through still life, portraiture, and abstraction to speak through form, gesture, and atmosphere.

I am endlessly drawn to the spaces between things: between presence and absence, the fractional moment between memory and feeling, word and breath, definition and dissolution.

The objects I photograph often carry a silent weight of ritual. Woven through their textures and arrangements are mythological undertones of social life that define rigid categories and contradictions we are asked to inhabit. I am most interested in how images might gesture toward what is unseen but struggling to become visible, and how meaning extends beyond the frame.

My work often uses alternative processes and large-format film, painting, reflective surfaces, handmade and found objects to materially explore the expectations we place on images.

What ties my work together is a belief in the beauty I see in the human need for interconnectedness: in reconciling experiences of illegibility, and in the struggle to be seen in all our complexity. I believe these forms of beauty play vital roles in how we can question the limits of language and imagination-and strive for a better world together.

I make images to explore how perception confronts the layered multiplicities of experience, identity, and relationship-with others and with ourselves.