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10-26 April at ANCA Gallery
Opening 10 April 6-8pm
Elesa Stellios
Emily Burgess-Orton
Janet Jeffs
Nina Casey-Brown:
Soft Expose
Elesa Stellios, CLICK HERE for salvation!, 2026, digital application, dimensions variable. Image Courtesy of the artist.
Critical dates:
EXHIBITION OPENING: 10 APRIL 6–8pm
ON VIEW: 10-26 aPRIL
Gallery HOurs: fri–sun 11–4pm
Soft Expose looks at the connections between the body, perception, the experience of the sublime and a speculative future saturated by new technologies. Bringing together the practices of Emily Burgess-Orton, Nina Casey-Brown, Janet Jeffs and Elesa Stellios, their work moves us between encounters with vulnerabilities, distortions of the self and imaginings of realities just beyond the horizon. These works also recognise the ambivalent nature of human experiences, offering cues for rest, interaction, pleasure and new forms of intimacy.
Janet Jeffs, Installation Dichroic Curtain/Unstable Ground: exploration of the contemporary sublime in the natural world, 2025, installation view. Image courtesy Brenton McGeachie.
Working across ceramic, textile, glass, painting, installation and interactive media, each artist approaches perception differently. Emily Burgess-Orton’s large-scale ceramic forms rest within domestic settings, their creased and weighted surfaces tracing the contours of bodies that resist repair. Nina Casey-Brown’s hand-silvered and blown glass mirrors bend and blur the act of looking. Halos and repeated circular forms catch and release light, fragmenting the viewer and unsettling the promise of a perfect reflection. Janet Jeffs moves between iridescent membranes and heavily layered, rust-toned canvases. Light filters through translucent films and gestures across rough surfaces, creating atmospheres that oscillate between the ethereal and the grounded. In contrast, Elesa Stellios adopts the language of commercial services, inviting audiences to sit, watch, participate and buy in. Borrowing from the visual grammar of advertising and persuasion, her installation stages encounters with technologies that promise transcendence while quietly shaping how we see and are seen.
Nina Casey-Brown, Folded Distortion, 2026, blown glass, 240x270x35mm. Image courtesy of the artist.
Together, the works do not offer clarity. Instead, they create spaces where perception is slowed and unsettled. Light glances from surface to surface, from glass to glaze, from screen to skin, drawing connections between material bodies and mediated futures. In this movement, exposure is not simply revelation. It is a condition of being present with distortion, with pleasure, and with the shifting boundaries between the intimate and the infinite.
Emily Burgess-Orton, Existing Beside the Invisible Pain (In Motion), 2025, stoneware, textile and beeswax, 1100x1370x800mm. Image courtesy Brenton McGeachie.
These artists were chosen from the ANU School Art & Design 2025 Graduating Exhibition as part of the Emerging Artist Support Scheme (EASS).
ANCA Inc.
1 Rosevear Place
Dickson ACT 2602
Fri–Sun 11–4pm, Thursdays by appointment
gallery@anca.net.au
tel. (02) 6247 8736
Australian National Capital Artists Incorporated acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land on which we live, lean and work, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people.