How has Steves Practise evolved over the period of his career, i.e from Political social and hisotorical concerns to issues of colour and form?

Steve was born in Auckland New Zealand. He now works and lives and works here too. He majored in printmaking at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, studying with Professor Carole Shepheard. He has noted an "initial attraction to the ‘Otherness’ of the print medium, to its technical challenges transferrals and displacements that he has acknowledged as having a certain parallel in personal experience".

At the beginning of Steve's profession career his work was very directed towards concepts of 'stasis and change'.
He also has many ideas of time, transistion and change presented in his works.
In many of Steve's earliest wors he examines the "shifting vagaries of identity politics" within New Zealand’s ‘cultural landscape.’
Posing questions shuch as "what is our cultural landscape, who can claim to have the authority to control its definition, who is seen, who is invisible, who is resident and who is deemed alien?" - in New Zealands culture.

He was very much concerned with history and story telling. "More specifically the process where we as private individuals participate in public space and so become part of public discourse and historical record" - said Steve during the interview.
At another level he is interested in private space and public space, how these spaces are determined by 'laws, rules and narrative'.




In the work "Holding the man" (1996) Steve looks at the HIV crisis. Here the personal and political become indistinguishable and impersonal from one another… this is how Steve somewhat describes the Political movement of the last 25 years..



The above work is "It's a life", looking at the things stated above.

Speaking parts.



As his work progressed Steve began to construct things that included audio files to, as the work "speaking parts" above. He looked into connection with close friends – way of constructing space between fact or fiction. He tests notions of objectivity. Building electronics etc. He said using this kind of stuff was really interesting. He 'bought junk' from superelectronics and stuff like that…
He then went onto a work called "Echo chamber" which was even more complex, it included 25 individual soundtracks.
Individual memory, and response intersect, a "concerned photographic memory". Steve sought to provide insight to ‘unremembered past’. He states his primary concern was the function of the first person narrative to oppose and to contradict the demand for ‘objective’ ’rational’ linear accounting of our lives.

In His work he liked to make the works about them, not about "me" - he said.works.

Steve stated he like finding ways to become resistant. This factor I think was very obvious in the above works, the works from early on in his professional career.




In 2002 started winding things back to more simple less electronics…
When he gave up painting, needed to employ photography allowed him to import into his work things from the world around him that seemed important.
He began using juztaposistion in his work, chaning the form around, and bringing collisions of events into the same realm.
Another major part of some of these works were doing them in dip tychs. I really liked these works where steve contrasts two images next two each other, as I think for each veiwer trying to find the link between the two images would be a very different experience. As with each image there are possible very different memories associated.



Up and down, video camera at britomart excalator then took stills…



Untitle, 08-09 …. Colour screen prints, they have gone to Egypt Alexandria.

Now adays Steve has gone completly off the political and historical issues,(maybe not completely - but one the surface).
In this work he uses scribbles which he says "cancels out division or maybe just indecisive"
He said "stuff about social stuff- I maybe need a rest form that stuff, more abstract"...
I like the aesticitcs of these pieces. He uses mauve against yellows, which I think is really beauitful, and now isalso doing more exploring into the effects of these colours.
He punches holes through things. About this he says, "there is something kinda abstract about putting a hole through something… a whole punched through the middle of something"


http://web.utk.edu/~imprint/Lovett.html

http://www.artbash.co.nz/article.asp?id=1031