Meighan Ellis is a lens based artist, amateur petrologist and an aspiring antiquarian. Currently based in Auckland, New Zealand, Meighan also lectures in photography and contextual studies, ghostwrites, and art directs for a stable of brands and boutique clients. She resided for a number of years in London, Sydney and Tokyo working as a fine arts/design educator, photographer and writer for various international print and on-line publications, including reviewer and features writer for Tokyo Art Beat. Shifting to employ HD video and networked technologies as an extension of her art practice and investigating the axis of the still and moving image via Portraiture-Meighan has exhibited strands of this work in New Zealand, the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan.
"To admit being a collector, an admirer of beauty, like that of the Lepidopterist, determines me guilty for receiving and experiencing the sheer pleasure of looking and making an archive of curiosity. My scopic drive is a permitted and privileged gaze, a love of looking, a safe way to regard this male posturing via the muted tableau on screen." - MD
“Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman: Woman is sedentary, man hunts, journeys; Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so.”
-Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse. 1979
Meighan's essay
Beauty, Beauty Look at You which outlines a feminised gaze picturing the beautiful masculine via contemporary modes of presenting moving image and tracing a lineage of the networked screen to historical devices of viewing- was recently published in the Academic journal- Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus Spring 2013 Edition:
Tracing New/Media/Feminisms.
Selected Exhibitions
2016 LANDSCAPE, Sanderson Contemporary Gallery, Auckland
Education
MFA (1st Class Hons. with Distinction) | BDES (Hons.)
