Electra Pelias

Masters of Fine Arts, Studio Arts

Soft Targets

The spaces we inhabit between love and resentment, closeness and distance, safety and fear are never fixed; they shift constantly. What is soft is never simply gentle, and what is familiar is never entirely safe. Birthdays are scary.

My work lives in these quiet thresholds where truths begin to surface. My thesis exhibition, Soft Targets, gathers multiple bodies of work that collapse the distance between contradiction. Installed within a house-like environment, the exhibition transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar, inviting dialogue around the subtle oscillations between the mundane and the uncanny. Through ceramic sculpture, found-object installation, printmaking, and fiber art, Soft Targets explores how materiality, memory, and emotion intertwine to shape stories of place, trauma, and transformation.

Grounded in personal experience, Soft Targets emerges from a lifelong negotiation of duality, shaped by the mirrored identity of being a fraternal twin and the divided geography of growing up between two households. These early structures of sameness and separation inform both my engagement and the work's engagement with contradiction: how tenderness can carry threat, how care can become burden, and how what is fragile, needy, or unraveling may reveal unexpected forms of resilience. Personal anecdotes stitch these works together, offering glimpses into how the intimate and the ordinary can slip into the uncanny. In dwelling within these tensions, Soft 

Targets seeks meaning in what remains unresolved, allowing the quiet, uncomfortable truths of intimacy, memory, and identity to emerge through material and form.