Noah Davis had a mind for pastiche, pulling from sources as heterogeneous as ancient Egyptian mythology and the paintings of Édouard Manet, to the modernist architecture of Paul R. Williams, family albums and The Jerry Springer Show (1991–2018). Call it the time-traveller’s instinct. ‘He was a great student of art history,’ the curator Helen Molesworth told Scott Indrisek in a 2020 Artsy essay. ‘He had an enormous number of pictures in his head.’