David Noonan

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present the first Los Angeles solo exhibition by the London based, Australian born artist David Noonan. The opening reception will be held on Friday, September 8th from 6 to 9pm, and the exhibition will be on view through October 7th. Historical imaginations, invented memories, bohemianism and late 20th century British theatre inspire David Noonan’s installation of large-scale screen prints, collages and bronze sculptures.

Within his large-scale montages, Noonan fabricates stills of ersatz performances involving gurus, masked figures, harlequins, and exotic fauna. These participants are presented in a cosmological and psychological realm. Noonan hints at a mythology without provenance and suggests an inexplicable scene beyond the material world. The work’s layered, cinematic imagery becomes like a physical interpretation of filmic space and at times alludes to the surrealist and complex constructions of Latin American filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky in films such as Holy Mountain and Fando y Lis.

In his collages, Noonan intensifies ambiguous black and white imagery collected from disparate sources, mainly books and magazines, by reassembling them according to a personal logic. Johanna Fahey describes one of Noonan’s previous installations as a “custom-made flashback, tailored with an appreciation for aesthetics [used] to create a historical flavor.”* In Noonan’s new series, visions of a quasi – spiritual, separatist community, a pagan cult of sorts, are prompted by photographs of children and adults dancing, hugging, and practicing abstract artwork. Within these peculiar scenes preachers, doting fathers, and mother figures nurture youth through seemingly ritualistic acts. The work perhaps serves as a simulated narrative of David Noonan’s childhood, but the imagination is a disobedient historian and the fiction within the work is profoundly dominant.

David Noonan will be participating in The Rings of Saturn opening at the Tate Modern in October, and is preparing for a residency at Me-di-um, St. Barths, French West Indies. He has had solo exhibitions at Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia, HOTEL, London, England, Foxy Production, New York, NY, Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney, Australia and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia. He has participated in group exhibitions worldwide, including Japan, The Czech Republic, New Zealand, Spain, and Scotland.

Pressetext

David Noonan