David Noonan- Films and Paintings 2001-2005

David Noonan: Films and Paintings 2001-2005 continues the Monash University Museum of Art’s ongoing series of exhibitions which survey the work of significant contemporary artists.

Encompassing new and recent films, paintings, collages and graphic works, the project is the culmination of critically acclaimed exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Melbourne and Sydney from 2001 to 2005; and coincides with the publication of a new monograph on the artist, written by Johannah Fahey, and published by Thames and Hudson.

David Noonan creates intriguing, scenographic spaces which envelop and absorb the spectator. Integrating painting, film and sculpture in all-encompassing installations that resemble cinematic sets, and absorbing decorative interiors, like the best cinema, Noonan’s moving pictures evoke a world of emotional intensity and psychological insight. His work is at once filmic and painterly, as much about feeling as it is about looking.

David Noonan: Films and Paintings 2001-2005 includes the premiere of a newly commissioned four-channel film installation, with observations on architecture, landscape, the body, natural (and unnatural) history. Made of shadows and flickering light, Noonan’s films evoke the protocinematic forms of tapestry and romantic painting. Noonan’s interest in time (real, lapsed and travelled), as well as in the materialist and formal aspects of film language, is also reminiscent of structuralist film-making of the 1960s and 70s. The play of light and shadow, narrative and mise-en-scene in Noonan’s paintings and graphic works likewise encourages the exploration of sensual, subliminal and ethereal states, of otherworldliness, and poetic ways of being.

Noonan’s complex layering of historical and contemporary cultural motifs moves across time and space, encompassing the histories of modernism, parapsychology, bohemianism, and the gothic, among other cultural reference points from art and film, music and literature, fashion and popular culture.