multivalent
Teela Misa DeLeón
5th March - 4th April 2026
Opening 5pm Thursday 5th March
My work explores how meaning resists containment — how perception, memory, and identity are layered, fragmented, and continually remade. Images can reflect things we can't fully see or explain.
I use symbolic still life and emphasis on the evocative potency of form to suggest the complexity of stories and relationships that aren't easily shown in a single frame. The works are symbolic and narrative in a way that is abstract and conceptual. They don't tell a story that is easily deciphered; they stage encounters rather than conclusions.
Through arrangements of natural and constructed materials — flowers, mirrors, string, bone, pigment — I consider how stories unravel and reform across bodies, materials, and time. Like elements with multiple valences, objects and symbols combine differently with each viewer's experience, creating meaning that is contingent — shaped by context, memory, and proximity.
This work is a visual poem revolving around my thoughts about nuance, dualities, and how we influence and transform each other. The sequence of images — like a sequence of events — suggests how stories bind, unravel, and reform across time and experience, revealing meaning-making as a continuous process. Our lives and rituals of meaning-making are connected even when we are apart.
— Teela Misa DeLeón
teela misa deleón
Teela Misa DeLeón is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working 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.
Through an integration of tactile making and conceptual inquiry, their practice traces intimate and historical intersections—where collective memory meets the emotional and material realities of bodies, identities, and our relationship to images. These images offer slow and intentional encounters—sites for intuitive sensing and reflection on a poetics of visibility and the subtle rituals of seeing embedded in everyday life that shape meaning.
DeLeón is based in Olympia, Washington, on the traditional unceded land of the Coast Salish peoples. Recent recognition includes the Pasadena Photo Award and a featured interview with curator Eve Schillo published in Lenscratch. Their work has been exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest and United States, including venues such as Praxis Gallery, Photographic Center Northwest, Verum Ultimum Art Gallery, and Plaxall Gallery. 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.
Recent bodies of work include Object Permanence, documenting queer and trans life through sentimental objects; Bind/Unbound/Bind, investigating relational perception through material rupture; and Legible Silences, exploring silence as presence rather than absence.
Instagram: @havenever.ever
