David Noonan creates imagery that evokes a sense of the otherworldly, where intimate moments of internal reflection intertwine with the performative in a filmic display of narrative. A heightened sense of ethereality is never far away from Noonan’s work. His exhibition, Scenes, at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), explored movements between time and space, various states of human consciousness and the sublime. ACCA’s voluminous exhibition space was the perfect location for this work which included plywood cut-out figures scattered throughout the space as well as screen-printed collages containing imagery of mime artists and theatre performers. The sheer height of the space, and the sisal matting that was laid over the floor, provided the work with both a scale and an overt materiality that enveloped the spectator’s field of vision, imbuing the work with an aesthetic clarity that was at once awkward and poetic.
The screen-printed collages that were printed onto linen and jute cloth framed the space and acted as allegorical vignettes frozen in time. Appropriating imagery from remnants of film, magazines and book archives, Noonan’s cut and paste strategy of image production has created photomontages that combine a cinematic quality with a dramatic play of light and shade. Towards the rear of the space a photomontage presented a group of performers in which one figure is dancing—her stance appearing incredibly gestural yet languid—whilst the others are in various states of embrace or highly stylised movement. There is an air of deliberateness to Noonan’s conceptualisation of this work as the edges of the printed cloth remain visible whilst multiple layers are superimposed over the top to give the work a heavily textural surface and a sense of visual