Burn Out

Steve Carr works across a range of media, from performance to blown glass, photography and film. His works often combine a high degree of technical and aesthetic refinement with references to mainstream culture. Burn Out continues a long-running trend in Carr’s practice to tap into the predominantly male youth cultures of boy racers, bogans and heavy metal.

Representing a return to Carr’s southern roots, Burn Out is an ode to the South Island bogan: ‘That romantic bogan who listened to Guns ‘n’ Roses but also read Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull and played chess. That is very much a South Island bogan.’

Burn Out pairs a landscape recalling the art historical Romantic Sublime with the mechanical cacophany of the suburban boy racer. Carr’s static camera and carefully composed shot emphasise the ‘painting-like’ nature of the scene as smoke billowing from the ute’s tyres gradually obscures the bush-clad hills. As in earlier works from his Boganne series, 2000, consisting of images based on heavy rock album covers, or Air Guitar, 2001, a film of the dry ice-wreathed artist engaged in the rapturous contortions of an air guitar epic, Carr both celebrates and satirizes bogan culture.

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