Megan Archer

Megan Archer holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ilam School of Fine Arts, Canterbury University (2010). Having lived in London and Berlin for seven years, Archer returned to New Zealand in 2018 and now maintains a studio practice in central Auckland. Abroad she has exhibited in London, Berlin and Melbourne.

Megan first began creating collages in 2015, using her hoarded collection of 1970s-80s books and magazines, from vintage porn to old recipe books. Her images are at once nostalgic and uncanny, conflating advertising’s glossy, and manufactured images to subvert expectations and incite cognitive dissonance. Drawing the viewer in, these surreal worlds call into question notions of desirability and taste, though not without Archer’s wry sense of humour.

Archer also uses the collage as a way of introducing abstraction and surrealism into her painting practice, manipulating cut-outs in Photoshop before rendering the result in oil on canvas. Her paintings depict photomontages of human bodies which she has digitally manipulated into near-abstract forms. The resulting images, now barely recognisable as human yet unmistakably 'of the flesh,' shift the focus from titillation to aesthetic contemplation.