Artist Ellie Yonova is the creator of the beautiful photographs that will be presented to the winners in five of the award categories tonight. These photographs were part of her 2007 exhibition The Big Picture at the Christina Parker Gallery in St. John’s.
She explains that these photographic images have been created using recognizable objects that lose their “identity” when depicted to gain a new meaning, allowing the audience to make a personal discovery. The whole process happens in front of the lens, captured in the way it is designed, with no additional manipulation afterwards.
She says, “Playing with light, glass, water, natural objects and colors, I try to elaborate and define my own style, keeping the objects recognizable to a certain degree, while extracting some abstract details from them.”
The result is unique exotic images, sumptuous and lush, charged with their own energy, bursting inside out, deconstructing the reality in abstract pieces both real and unreal.
Ellie Yonova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. She graduated from the Moscow Film Institute, majoring in cinematography for film and TV. In 1999 she moved to Canada and settled in Newfoundland. She has worked as a Director of Photography for European, Canadian and American feature films and television documentaries. Her works have been screened at festivals nationally and internationally and have brought many awards to her credit.
She says that still photography is her first love and takes pictures wherever in the world her work takes her.