Steve Carr is a leading New Zealand artist working predominantly across film, photography and sculpture. Within Carr’s practice, a preoccupation with controlled experiments, processes and outcomes is evident, manifesting in moments of subtle, humorous, and sometimes violent material transformation. Seemingly banal events – such as paint-filled balloons popped with a needle or a bubble meeting its demise on the tip of a cactus – are brought to life in real time, slow motion, loops and time lapse. Through the depiction of these somewhat incongruous actions, Carr resists the kinds of detached spectatorship induced by the current era of unprecedented visual stimuli, encouraging time for sustained observation and reflection.

Carr was a co-founder of Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin; a board member of Auckland’s Artspace (2002-04); and a board member of Christchurch’s The Physics Room (2016-19). Since 2016, he has been a Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury’s Ilam School of Art. Carr has exhibited extensively across New Zealand and Australia, including Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland; Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch; City Gallery, Wellington; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin; Tauranga Art Gallery, Tauranga; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; Govett-Brewster/Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. His works are held in the collections of many of these major institutions.

Steve Carr

Smoke Bubbles 1–58

Steve Carr

Watermelon

Steve Carr

Variations for Troubled Hands