David Noonan
September 8 – October 7, 2006

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.
 
For more information or for directions to the gallery please contact us
at (323) 222-1482, send a fax to (323) 227-7933 or email
info@davidkordanskygallery.com

*From: “David Noonan: Before and Now,” Thames and Hudson, London, England, 2005