Multimedia artist, fine art photographer, and creative director highly experienced in analog and digital photography, and the production of large-scale artworks, exhibitions and other creative campaigns, including managing creative teams.
My artwork has been featured in publications such as Black & White magazine, Harper's Bazaar, & Portfolio Magazine, and has won numerous international awards including the Prix de la Photographie Paris, Photography Master's Cup USA, and the Black and White Spider Awards UK.
I'm a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology & Empire State College in New York City, receiving my Associate degree (AAS) in Display & Exhibition Design and a Bachelor's degree (B.Sc) in Visual Arts, both with honors, Magna Cum Laude.
I then completed the fine art postgraduate program at the Beit Berl art campus with honors. Back in NYC, I studied photographic alternative processes at ICP (International Center of Photography) and abstract painting at the New York Students Art Leagues.
Artist Statement
My photography and multimedia installations result from a conscious dialogue with art history and other clear aesthetic structures.
At the same time, on a deeper level, there exists an active space in which I take elements of my personal and professional lives, and blend them in curious ways to reach for a new hybrid form of presenting a sensation of my world.
Different personas blend as the content of the work is based on real-life experiences combined with ones that stem from letting go of the rules of reality and just dreaming.
When I work I play with a mix of ready-mades and original materials, ideas and concerns. I blend the boundaries of the mediums that I engage with and raise questions as to the validity of an artwork, and the place it may hold in the field. A photograph disguised as architecture, a sculpture disguised as a painting, digital pretends to be analog and so forth.
A substantial part of my work (a project I officially started shooting in 2006) consists of self-portraits (stills and video) which are created in the act of camera performance. The “rules” of performing in front of a live audience change. The element of spontaneity that stems from performance lingers while at the same time, a post-meditated thought process brings the work
into its next level via post-production.
A pathological urge to integrate my physical body with different source materials is expressed through these self-depictions. The undercurrent issues I investigate in my work are ones such as the female body and its different perceptions, the politics of identity, advertising and fame, tensions between high and low cultures, and motherhood constructs.
In my development as an artist, I’ve felt an affinity to such artists as Yasumasa Morimura, Kimiko Yoshida, Kahlo, Dana Schutz, Katharina Grosse, Kimiko Yoshida, Louise Bourgeois, Francesca Woodman, Lillian Bassman and Paolo Roversi.
In my work, my goal is to create a sensory and intellectual experience that is at the same time tempting and jarring, beautiful and overwhelming, harmonious and dissonant, comic and tragic. People experiencing my work can undergo a fluctuating sensation between loving it and hating it, between “getting it” and not understanding it at all.
I (still) believe in the power of art to make a change. In innovation and originality in a world where these concepts have long gone disintegrated. I (still) believe in the fluidity of gender and identity as a path for spiritual ascension.
From Waking Dreams Solo Show Press Release:
Ella’s imaginative and exuberant energy is cast throughout her works and paints an electrifying and stimulating sort of imagery. As a self-taught painter, Ella has trained herself to think and create freely without rules and restrictions.
With spontaneity evocative of action painting, Ella’s otherworldly energy collaborates to produce imagery with luminescent depth and contrasty yet harmonious movement.
The color palette for this body of work paints with dark moody colors, brightly saturated tones, neon vibrations, and mysterious textural backgrounds. Opaque subjects are juxtaposed with semi-transparent effects that look like layered film stills that are dually surging with momentum and movement.
Whirlwinds of zeal and dedication offer a solid and powerful body of work, full of thought-provoking visual and emotional referents.
Manor uses photography as a boxing ring in which fantasy and its fulfillment can wrestle, between the vision and its materialistic expression.
