Biography

Born in New York in 1976, Ellie Ga received a BFA from Marymount Manhattan College, New York (1998), and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York (2004). Combining narrative genres such as memoir, documentary, and travelogue, Ga’s projects use a range of media including performance, photography, video, sculpture, and installation to explore the limits of the human capacity to objectively document and reconstruct both personal and historical events. Ga’s research-intensive projects involve historical and geographical investigations, and the final works triangulate artistic, historical, and scientific systems of knowledge. Throughout her practice, Ga deploys these varying interpretive modes to question the distinctions between personal and public histories, image and text, and fact and fiction. Using exploration as both method and theme, she assembles journals, photographs, videos, slideshows, and observational drawings that merge objective analysis and subjective imagination to interpret her experience of the world. Ga typically works in series, distilling multiple artworks from a single object of inquiry. In Square, Octagon, Circle (2012–14), for example, her fascination with the ancient Lighthouse at Alexandria, Egypt, and its mythic, social, and archaeological import became the springboard for several interconnected videos, performances, photographs, and ephemera. Similarly, The Fortunetellers (2007) presents an autobiographical narrative based on the artist’s five-month artist residency aboard the Tara, a research sailboat set adrift in the frozen waters near the North Pole. Floating aimlessly without engine or rudder in one of the most remote, inhospitable regions on the planet, the Tara was voyaging into the unknown, and Ga’s work probes a purposeful scientific endeavor set amid the unpredictable contingencies of the natural world. Ga has had solo exhibitions at the Newark Museum of Art (2005); Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon (2009); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2014); and the M-Museum, Leuven, Belgium (2014–15). Her work has also been presented in a number of group exhibitions, including Subject Index, Konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden (2008); Momentum Biennial, Moss, Norway: Imagine Being Here Now (2011); Walking, Drifting, Dragging, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2013); and Arctic, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2013). Ga has received several honors, including a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Grant (2000), Albert Murray Trust Foundation Grant (2002), National Endowment of the Arts Publication Grant (2006), and Swedish Research Council project grant (2014). She lives and works in New York and London.