David Noonan

Untitled, 2006

David Noonan pits image against image in an evocative and sometimes unnerving meditation on the resonance of material and representation. Through the lens of found photographs, Noonan dissolves, repeats, and resituates images to explore memory, nostalgia and association. His multi-panel silk-screen works feature overlapped images to create dreamlike scenes where narrative or formal meanings are elusive. By presenting the most stylised of images, freed from their original context, he explores the workings of memory, connotation and sentiment.

Noonan often uses black and white images of actors engaged in robust, stylised performances, adorned in revealing experimental costumes and sets them against jarring backgrounds of avant-garde theatre spaces. There is a vexing disjunction between performer and scene: mismatched figures and backgrounds disrupt the viewer's sense of scale and thwart their impulse to create narrative.