Join us for the opening night of Steve Carr's How to Disappear at our Auckland City Gallery from 5-7pm on Tuesday 29 July.
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.
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