Steve Carr

Steve Carr currently lives and works in Christchurch, New Zealand and is represented in New Zealand by MICHAEL LETT (Auckland) and in Australia by STATION (Melbourne/Sydney). He has been a Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury’s Ilam School of Art since 2016. Carr’s work is frequently about precise moments of transformation, he uses lens-based practices as well as sculpture to explore and interfere with a range of materials and entities, from apples and watermelons, to balloons filled with paint, shuttle-cocks, fireworks and smoke. The artist himself is often the subject of the change where he has become half-animal, a strange man-child, and a pre-teen girl. He has turned fire extinguishers into glass, bear rugs into wood, tyres into bouquets, and even himself into popcorn.

Steve Carr was born in Gore, New Zealand in 1976, and graduated with an MFA from the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 2003. He was the co-founder of the Blue Oyster Gallery in Dunedin, a board member of Auckland’s Artspace (2002-04) and a board member of Christchurch’s The Physics Room (2016-19). Recent solo exhibitions include Chasing the Light, City Gallery Wellington (2019)/National Gallery of Victoria (2019)/Christchurch Art Gallery (2018), A Manual for Small Archives, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2016), Bullet Time, Wellington City Gallery (2016), Stretching Time, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2014).