How did you get into making art?
I spent a lot of time growing up with my grandmother, who taught and performed shamisen, a traditional Japanese stringed instrument. Making things while she played and taught was a casual ritual that became a part of me, and I have been drawn to that kind of stillness and focus ever since. In school I tried to resist pursuing art. I studied gender and sexuality, psychology, critical theory, and communications, and all of it brought me back to art, which holds all of those subjects as a living practice.
What are you currently working on?
I always have a few projects running alongside each other at different paces. Right now I’m working on Object Permanence, a queer and trans documentary portrait series archiving sentimental objects. It moves in a different direction from other recent bodies of work, without constructed arrangements or alternative process, but it asks the same question. What an object can carry that a person cannot say directly.
There is something powerful in how ideas and knowledge change the way we see.
Teela DeLeon
What inspired you to get started on this body of work?
For a long time I dismissed classical still life as mainly a display of class wealth and imperialism. Then I became enchanted with Juan Sánchez Cotán’s Spanish Golden Age paintings, and with how much reverence he gives the philosophical and scientific ideas of his time in the way he handles ordinary objects. A sense of wonder over astronomy is evident formally, in the suspended globe of a cabbage or a cantaloupe. There is something powerful in how ideas and knowledge change the way we see, how learning about planets in orbit might change the way you look at what was just a cabbage on a counter the day before. Ideas and understanding expand and contract the way we see things. Whether we care about it or not, the symbolism attached to still life has been a contracting force, and it still influences the way we think about objects in images. What would the rose be to you if it were not known to be a symbol of love? This project was about entering the fixed architecture of still life and pressing the edges outward, unfixing it enough to let the rose be itself and whatever it needs to be to the viewer at the same time.
Do you work on distinct projects or do you take a broader approach to your practice?
The bodies of work I make are distinct containers but they are all in broader conversation with each other. Meaning accumulates within them and between them. Sometimes a question comes up in one project and leads to another, or returns in a different refrain.
What’s a typical day like in your studio?
There are no typical days. But whatever is happening that day, there’s probably string involved.
Who are your favorite artists?
It changes. Hiroshi Sugimoto has been an important artist to me for a long time. Others belong to particular stretches of working. While I was making Multivalent I was thinking a lot about Diana al-Hadid, Awoiska van der Molen, and Dawoud Bey. Artists whose work stimulate questions about structure and the organic, the act of seeing and knowing, and the structures we navigate between.
Where do you go to discover new artists?
Not in any organized way. When I find new artist, I am usually chasing a topic or a technique rather than a name or particular forum.
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