Biography - John Noestheden

John Noestheden was born in Amsterdam in 1945 and moved to Canada in 1951. He received his BFA in 1973 from the University of Windsor and his MFA in 1975 from Tulane University in New Orleans. Monumental drawing obsessed him for 4 years and in 1979 and 1980 he produced two Skywriting drawings - a four mile diameter "Halo Piece" over Toronto and a four mile diameter equilateral triangle over Kingston, Ontario. Noestheden supported his family and art practice as a self employed furniture maker and designer until 1990 when he accepted a position at the University of Regina teaching Sculpture and Drawing. Noestheden’s art making includes public art commissions, public performance works and works on paper.



Noestheden has completed public art commissions for: Asper Jewish Community Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba; Cineplex Odeon, Houston, Texas; City of Regina, Saskatchewan; City of Jinan, China; Skydome CP Hotel, Toronto, Ontario; Nuit Blanche 08, Toronto, Ontario; STADTHIMMEL (CitySky), Basel Switzerland. His most recent work is a science-specific, number/code/equation and text piece sandblasted into the material surfaces of the 5 storey atrium in the Sciences Lab Building at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan.

Noestheden has generated public performance works that reference Pi, the Square Root of Two and historical representations of the universe. He has collaborated with mathematician Dr. Stephen Kirkland of the University of Regina, dancer and performance artist Robin Poitras of New Dance Horizons, dancer and choreographer Helen Walkley, sound, movement and theatre artist Michele Sereda, and the artist collective ONO (One Night Only). His most recent performances were public interventions in shopping malls that incorporated discreet monetary gifting (acts of love). The generation of rumor and storytelling became the only existing evidence of the event.

For 20 years, Noestheden has been producing a body of large scale works on paper. This ongoing investigation’s conceptual focus is the representation of the universe. His media include acrylic ink and paint, thousands of silver crystals (Swarovski) and titanium ore. Source materials include photo-mediated transcriptions of images extracted from star maps, Hubble photographs, Vincent Van Gogh’s skies and historical astronomy documents. Noestheden considers each crystal work a unique spectacle - a hallelujah chorus.