Culture

Dunedin Public Art Gallery
Exhibited until 15 June 2014

Auckland based artist Steve Carr is currently exhibiting a new series of work at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery as a result of his ten-week residency under the Gallery’s Visiting Programme. Carr was awarded the 2013 Dunedin Public Art Gallery Residency, the New Zealand Creative New Zealand Grant and the Headlands Residency at the Headlands Centre of Art in San Francisco, USA.

Steve Carr was born in New Zealand in 1976, and completed his Masters at Elam School of Fine Arts under renowned contemporary New Zealand artist, Michael Parekowhai, whose work also stems from complex production processes, functioning in the realm of the “spectacular.”

His work has been in many major national and international exhibitions, which most recently includes Videos of New Zealand, a touring exhibition through New Zealand, Germany and Denmark. In 2011 Carr participated in the Rencontres Internationales, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He also represented New Zealand at the Busan Biennale, Metropolitan Art Museum, South Korea in 2006. And in 2010 he was the recipient of the Sapporo Artist in Residence in Japan. Carr’s work is held in a number of significant public and private collections throughout Australasia and further abroad.

Carr’s new series, Stretching Time, is an immersive and engaging installation that plays with spectacle; metaphorically, and literately, “stretching time.” Carr’s work allows for a slowing of spectacle, giving the viewer more time to explore and expand upon it through the subtle utilisation of time lapse techniques, focusing in and out on a series of singular forms creating the charming and elicit spectacle that is Stretching Time.

Range, the opening piece, brings together a collection of unique golf balls that were prototyped in 2013 for release this year. The golf balls were tested and designed for the current top tier of international golf players and the opportunity arose for Carr to make an artwork out of them when he was on the Headlands Artist in Residence Programme in San Francisco, which immediately preceded his time in Dunedin.

The presentation of golf balls is situated on the wall of the lobby in which the exhibition opens, and it shows a series of coloured discs, which (I failed to realise this until I actually looked a bit closer) are the inside of the golf balls. They are artfully displayed in symmetrical rows, which make up the rectangle of empty space and small coloured circles, which have been described as “a scientific chart that punctures the optical field.

It’s an interesting concept, an intriguing display and a delicate entrée to the optical expanse of the second part of the exhibition, Transpiration (2014), undoubtedly the most visually immersive part of the show. Transpiration literally and metaphorically slows down the process of time though Carr’s cinematic rendering and the elaborately constructed elements of mise-en-scene that enhance the act of spectating.

In this screening, Carr captivates the viewer through his repeating and sequencing of the manicured carnation arrangements, which are projected thirty metres across the walls of the gallery space. The sequence is equally as overwhelming as it is contemplative, as Carr brings the viewer’s attention to the fact that, although the technical process of the piece is somewhat simple, the optical result is expansive and intense. Carr delightfully transforms the common object, a carnation flower, into a charming, sensual and highly charged still life spectacle. You are able to loose yourself in the moments of detail that are revealed through this process of “stretched time” – such distilled details that are otherwise lost in the process of real life time, which is often fast-paced, stressful and somewhat disengaged.

As Carr notes, the idea of “stretching time is important in a physical and personal way, because I want people to be aware, even before they see the show, that this is as much an exercise in relaxing as it is in sinking into a cinematic experience of the effects of time.”

Disregarding all this extra biographical and conceptual information about the show, overall, it was just really nice to be in an empty dark gallery space, subtly illuminated by projected images of pretty pastel coloured carnations on the wall. A brilliant and beautiful spectacle that you all must see – I want one on the wall in my apartment!