Design and Art Australia Online

David Noonan’s involvement with time based media has produced a significant body of video/film projects since the 1990s. His collaborations with Simon Trevaks including 99 (1999), 100mph (2002), The Likening (2002), and SOWA (2003) were notable not only for their polished production and presentation, but also for their detailed examination of cinematic language. Using hypnotic loops and installations that incorporated elements of the stage settings built for the videos, The Likening, for example, proposed a narrative of psychological horror involving doppelgangers that extended beyond the space of the screen into the gallery itself. SOWA – which took its title from the Polish word for owl – exposed the relationship between the audience and the subject of the video, a woman reading a book, underscoring the voyeuristic tensions between the watcher and the watched.

Noonan’s solo work with film and video is highly aestheticised in its visual stylings and achingly nostalgic for an era of black and white nouvelle vague artistry. Indeed, Noonan’s most recent work with installation – Black and White 8mm Films (2005) -achieved an almost anthropological air, albeit one seen through the pages of mid-century picture magazines such as Life or Look, and combined looped films screened on DVD with monochromatic stain paintings. The negation of an identifiable period “look” for the black and white film images – an owl, a woman wandering through long grass, a mock Tudor house in a forest – cast a strong if ambiguous spell on its audience.

Writers:

Andrew Frost

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