Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Double Negative by American artist David Moy. In the artist’s first presentation with the gallery, he interrogates the compounding nature of images, stacking and layering them until their totality becomes nothing—or everything. By appropriating images, videos, and phrases designed to capture attention, he reinterprets their methods of control. Utilizing contemporary digital printing processes, he subverts the very technologies of reproduction to serve his own purposes of negation, slippage, and disorientation. Through obfuscation and erasure, he creates documents that demand meditation and prolonged viewing—an extended form of attention. In doing so, he reintroduces what the internet has eroded: “the present moment”.
In an era dominated by media, the attention economy, alternative facts, and increasing individualization, Moy examines the mechanisms of submission shaped by echo chambers and the homogeneous routines imposed by companies exploiting user attention for profit. His work further explores how these consequences seep into offline consciousness, shaping perceptions and beliefs. He continually negotiates what it means to believe in the present, particularly when facts become obscured by simultaneous truths. Grappling with how to move forward, he considers the lingering weight of past afterimages in contrast to the anxieties of an uncertain future.
Double Negative will be on view from June 13th – July 19th in Brussels.
On occasion of this exhibition, Moy shares this artist statement:
"My focus is to understand the images that pierce and seduce us without hesitation. The advent of Generative AI Models will undoubtedly change the way that images are broadcasted and consumed. As of 2025, AI images feel like a balloon; they feel inflated. There is nothing behind them but hot air. They are agents of consumerism and fictitious realities with a fancy 4k facade. They become lifeless puppets dancing in a mirrored funhouse. In my work, I wonder If there is a possibility that they may do something else. Something quiet, something intimate, something sincere - something human. This led me to the question: What does it mean to give highly algorithmic computerized imagery the weight of a human being?
The portraits that are presented are of people that have taught me a life experience. Some have been difficult, some have taught me about a different way of living, and some have been nothing but pleasant. I will not disclose which is which. I wonder what a human connection is today and how can we navigate through it without fully understanding each other in this post truth, post capitalism, post digital, and post ironic world. I like to think about this part of my work as memorialization’s of people and time that the viewer can’t put their finger on. To situate them in a confused aspect of time but to also memorialize someone before they're gone when it feels like ‘the future has been canceled’. The triptych Permanent Descent and the Flower Series also have this quality; a cat that will never stop falling and never land on its feet. Our normal association of flowers in artwork is the impermanent beauty of their short lives but what happens if they were never actually there? The work’s surface and materiality, its drip, shift and slip, are in effort to bring digital images back down to us. In contrast to digital print outs that are extra perfect replications, this slippage makes it tangible and tactile; more sincere. In a way, to level the playing field from the images that hold power. To make the machine “trip”.
Regardless of what anyone will tell you, images are reflections. They can be used as empirical evidence but, nonetheless, are imitations. A portrait is not that person. A pipe is not a pipe. You are not you. It is something else. The upside-down orientation of the work alludes to both the sense of its mortality and its uncanniness. They have a haunting aspect to them, even though now, as of May 2025, these people are still living. We hold the possibility of death, unlike the puppet imagery that I have criticized above. They don’t have that weight. Yang Yang from the film Yi Yi, our boy protagonist, describes this divide between people. “Daddy, can we only know half of the truth? ...I can only see what's in front, not what's behind. So, I can only know half of the truth, right?” This is the subject matter of the work. The negation of the subject looking away from the viewer both implies a docile passivity and a refusal. If I may borrow some philosophical photography language; to photograph is to kill. It kills a moment, as it can’t be continued as it was in the past. This renders permanence and finality that, often today, is quickly replaced by new images in the form of 15 seconds. This is both a mediation and meditation on the world outside and in the cloud, because artists can only reflect society. Like an image."
David Moy (b. 1995, lives and works in New York, NY, US) studied at Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA, US and Hunter College, New York, NY, US. Moy has had recent exhibitions at Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA, US; Hyacinth Gallery, New York, NY, US; RAIN RAIN, New York, NY, US; ! Wild Card !, New York, NY, US and Galerie Tracanelli, Saint-Martin-d’Hérès, FR. In 2018, he received the Renaissance Graphics Award at Tyler School of Art.