STEVE CARR
How to Disappear
30 July – 23 August 2025
Opening Event: Tuesday 29 July, 5-7pm
Gow Langsford | Auckland City
In How to Disappear, Steve Carr leans deeper into his enduring role as the comic outsider, part magician, part sad clown, pursuing vanishing acts that never quite succeed. Across film, sculpture, and photography, Carr stages a series of near-escapes: crouched behind lenticular plastic, lost in coloured smoke, or swallowed by a moving bush. Each attempt is earnest, absurd, and knowingly doomed.
Drawing on a legacy of physical comedy from Chaplin to Three Amigos, Carr’s work embraces failure as a kind of truth. His silent protagonists, dressed in dad jeans and awkward disguises, aren’t heroes or alphas. They fumble, hide, and try again. Beneath the humour lies something more tender: a longing for transformation, transcendence, or simply a moment of reprieve from being seen.
Here, camouflage becomes costume, and disappearance becomes performance. A figure tries to merge with the landscape but never fully escapes it. Whether casting abandoned dog-poo bags in bronze or turning his own legs into a lamp, Carr shows us that even in the act of trying to disappear, something of us always remains - half-visible, gently ridiculous, and strangely moving.
The essay Dad Jeans by Anthony Byrt accompanies the exhibition.
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