Variations for Troubled Hands
Steve Carr
Perimeter Editions
Softcover
528 pages
210 x 148 mm
2017
ISBN 9780995358638
Leveraging the long history of hands in art and film – from the fetishistic symbolism of Surrealists Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, to the nonchalant minimalism of choreographer and experimental filmmaker Yvonne Rainer – prominent New Zealand artist Steve Carr’s Variations for Troubled Hands lifts its title from an imagined technical manual for ballerinas. Featuring more than 200 photographs of Cadence – a teenage ballet prodigy apprenticed to the Royal New Zealand Ballet – Carr’s debut book presents a serial composition in 12 parts, choreographed and performed by fingers, forearms, tendons, palms, wrists and thumbs. At once an interactive object and a performance space, Variations for Troubled Hands manifests the dynamics of movement, and invites us to dance with it.
About the Artist
In Steve Carr‘s wider practice time is perhaps the central actor. Operating at the crux of photography, moving image and a kind of deferred mode of performance, the New Zealand artist skirts the poetic, gestural, ad-hoc alchemic and quietly absurd in his film and photographic series, slowing time to a crawl as he interweaves actions, experiments and unlikely cultural references to create images that are at once deft and strangely virtuosic.
About the Publisher
Perimeter Editions is the award-winning publishing imprint of Melbourne-based bookstore Perimeter Books and distribution house Perimeter Distribution. Releasing its first publication in 2012, Perimeter Editions’ focus rests on publishing autonomous books in close collaboration with photographers, artists, curators and writers. Its publications exhibit a criticality and sensitivity to content and form.
