Danielle Mano - Bella is an analogue photographer, collage and installation artist who has exhibited throughout Tel Aviv as well as internationally in Vienna, Milano, and New York. Her most recent solo exhibitions include solo Artist Hause, Q-Gallery, and 14 Thiya in Tel Aviv. Collective exhibits include Paralle Vienna Art Fair, the Jewish Museum and Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem, ArtExpo and Agora Gallery in Chelsea, New York, and Gallery NUMERO 51 in Milano. Danielle’s awards include Hearts to Art Project as well as grants from Centers for Social Justice and Shankar College.
With a practice steeped in experimentation, Danielle Mano - Bella deconstructs photography to integrate with other interdisciplinary practices such as assemblage, collage, and installation. For example, her most recent works contain analogue cyanotype prints combined with a process of infusing silk aerogel and silk film. Within this complex chemical process, figures are distorted amidst a wash of screened cyan filmy substance, often with their heads removed or hidden. As a result, we are left with faceless solitary figures within smokey-bluish environments expressing different activities such as dancing, playing a guitar, or even crying in their own arms. Danielle’s installations are assemblage constructs consisting of cut out photographs containing nude figures, collectively joined into an organic form to fill the gallery to show a sense of unity and solidarity. These installations are sometimes large and imposing, usually taking up a large portion of a gallery space in a veiny manner much like how vines will overtake a dilapidated building.
The thematic overtones in Danielle Mano - Bella’s works often convey social interaction between different cultures within Israeli as well as international society. She desires to build a connection between diverse cultures and individuals to create a constructed-collective within her artworks. In the photographic collages she creates from her own modeled photography, Danielle morphs and blends several figures into chimera-like entities, fused into a single mode of expression. She sometimes incorporates PVC plastic into these collages which give the pieces a clipped-digital appearance, as if improvised and constructed in Photoshop instead of analogue collages. Disjointed and disfigured, her constructed ‘human structures’ are symbolic of social solidarity between various groups of people from different cultures and backgrounds, both locally and internationally. Her works reflect a sense of internationalism and a desire to build a global community through the humanism-based imagery and integrative techniques of her sprawling and mystified artworks.
Spread exemplifies ingenious blends of interdisciplinary and integrative practices within the visual arts. Besides being an installation, the artwork is also a photographic assemblage, work of fashion, and performance. Within the interior of the gallery, vine-like structures of clipped photographic nude figures intertwine to resemble foliage and fauna amongst the walls. The piece was followed by a performance of a figure outstretching their arms wearing the dress created for the installation while the attire contains prints of various photographic figures flailing against an open pale background, seemingly reaching for one another.
With a steep sociological take on human interconnectivity, Danielle Mano - Bella wishes to express unity within various communities with both her native Israel and internationally despite differences in appearance, sexual orientation, ethnic or religious background, and personal views. In a world measured by division, the art of Danielle Mano - Bella represents an art of peace. Through these constructs of contorted figures, whether solitarily dancing amidst a hazy-blue cloud of her cyanotype-silk-infused prints or blended together actors and anatomy to represent therianthropic-like configurations, structures, and forms, the artwork conveys complexity in expression. These dancing, wailing, and flailing figures within the pale moonlight of Danielle Mano - Bella's tinted and often monochromatic tones, yearn to physically and emotionally connect with fellow human beings. A seeking towards an end of social distance and isolation, searching for collective purpose and meaning.