When the Sun Goes Down: Dakota Noot

Sep 23

Sep 23 When the Sun Goes Down: Dakota Noot

Artist Profile, Oxnard College, Print Issue

By Madeleine Eve Ignon

Dakota Noot grew up in a seemingly incongruous cultural milieu of part rural Midwestern farm life and part pop culture media. Broadcast into his North Dakota living room in the 1990s, Noot was particularly drawn to the colorful, sardonic cartoons of the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. The contrast of these influences inspired the development of his unique “pop-political cartoon aesthetic,” distinctive pastel color palette, interest in drawing and painting animals, and wry sense of humor and subversion.

The dualities of Noot’s upbringing also drew him to explore the violence within the conservative politics of the community in which he grew up. He explains that animals – especially farm animals – typically recall calm scenes of pastoral tranquility. However, Noot chooses to use his bizzarely imaginative, vividly colorful hybrid animals to comment on the darker contours of what he experienced growing up in North Dakota.

Noot’s illustration-based work takes many forms, but it is always recognizable and engaging. He consistently works in colored pencil and crayon, outlining his figures in a signature blue (“I only work in that one shade of Prismacolor,” he says, “Ultramarine!”). Some works push into space like miniature theater sets through built layers of drawings mounted on foamcore.

More recently, his scenes and characters have defied the bounds of a frame to become eccentric cut-outs that comprise multi-part installations. One such installation was Meat Market: Tender Flesh, which he exhibited in 2018 at Cerritos College.

*Dakota Noot, You Don’t Love My Babies, performative photograph, photo by Christopher Velasco*

In 2020, Noot began mounting his cutouts on his body as “wearable drawings” and making videos and photographs, introducing an element of performance and character-building. Noot started using his body as an armature and force for crude animation. He had realized that he himself “could become a cartoon character” and “enact violence playfully on (his) own body.” He often poses wearing the “looks” in his bathtub or other corners of the living space he shares with his husband and creative collaborator, photographer and performance artist Christopher Velasco.

The two artists are in an intimate dialogue: Noot performs and Velasco shoots the off-the-cuff images, which casually but lovingly include the physical details of their lives in the background.

Domestic objects like shampoo bottles, art hung on the wall, light switches and bedsheets – objects the likes of which we all became more familiar with during the pandemic – become part of a homelife “set” space within which Noot casts his characters with compelling honesty.

The images, which fill his Instagram timeline like a diary, engage with both surreality and the mundanities of domestic life, particularly domestic queer life, and they resonate deeply after a strange year spent at home.

In this most recent work, Noot boldly embraces material ephemerality – “if it falls off it falls off,” he says – and seems to find new meaning in the hybrid creature-characters they allow him to become. The pieces are striking in their variability and wearability. Each look comes alive in the space between two and three dimensions, where paper meets flesh.

In an Instagram post from May 7, 2021, Noot showcases a piece titled “Death Laid an Egg.” The creature he wears appears to be half-chicken, half-woman. Guts and viscera fall out from between the artist’s legs. Beyond the color and character, it is striking to notice that Noot’s head is visible in the mirror behind him. We can see behind the curtain, and he lets us.

In an interview with Greg Thorpe of the UK-based online magazine, The Fourdrinier, Noot describes his surreal, graphic work as “very nerdy,” and “political” in the sense that his rural, hometown community would never accept it. Having a sense that Noot’s work exists in a complicated dialogue with his rural upbringing enriches the meanings and histories present in the images. In a post from July 18, 2020, Noot directly references his Midwestern roots, writing:

“If you aren’t a part of history, corrupt it. I’ve taken the image of Medora and her failed meat packing plant (that is still celebrated with the annual Medora Musical). I’ll never be a part of North Dakota history, but I will wear it, queer it, and make it ridiculous. North Dakota scarred me for life but I’ve never looked better.”

*Dakota Noot, Be Careful When You Trim, performative photograph, photo by Christopher Velasco*

Noot’s performative character personifies the failed De Mores meat-packing plant, an infamous site in Billings County, North Dakota.

“The Marquis de Morès built the town and a processing plant for meat/beef,” Noot told me. “His wife was heavily involved and designed their home there (her name, Medora, became the town name). They hoped the railroad would take/freeze the beef from North Dakota abroad. But it failed. Even though it failed, it’s become a legend of sorts for North Dakota. You can still tour their home, the small town of Medora, and the area around it. I love that the European settlement failed – but still became a part of North Dakota mythology. It’s very bizarre.”

Beyond growing up in North Dakota, Noot’s influences range from Australian performance artist and New York club-kid Leigh Bowery to underground filmmaker Jack Smith, who has been credited as the founding father of American performance art.

On the subject of his influences, Noot says, the work “is a different take on a lot of things. I’m not obsessed with the macho.” Certainly, Noot’s work is multi-layered and exploratory, and his creations avoid landing on any one side of gender, gender roles, species or configuration.

*Dakota Noot, Whoa There, Cowboy, performative photograph, photo by Christopher Velasco*

In some ways, Noot’s work and trajectory follow Los Angeles-based, Chattanooga-bred artist Wayne White’s line. White is known for bringing humor into fine art. Along with outlandish sets for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse in the late 1980s, he has also created a series of witty text interventions painted on kitschy thrift-store landscapes. Both artists contend with the complicated spaces of their youth, and bring their work back to their communities to spark dialogue and re-contextualize their ideas and themes.

Currently, Noot is showing with his father in North Dakota in Father & Son – The Beast Within Us, which showcases both artists’ use of “vibrant colors, sci-fi like elements and bold textures.” It will travel across North Dakota and the surrounding area. This year it will be exhibited at the Northeast Arts Center at Minot State University, and in 2022 it will be at The Arts Center (Jamestown), James Memorial Art Center (Williston), MonDak Heritage Center (Sidney, Montana) and the Taube Museum of Art (Minot).

Noot is currently an adjunct professor at Oxnard College and Orange Coast College. Along with Velasco, he co-founded the nomadic curatorial project Scream Queen.

The flavors of camp, hybridity and pseudo-horror in Noot’s work are sophisticated and nuanced, yet direct in their references and bold juxtapositions. His art allows him to proudly “embrace the monster” within, and he invites his audiences to do just the same.