Photo by Byungsuk Yoon
David Moy
My work stems from my discomfort with the current age of burnout, image overload, and the resultant disorientation and fatigue within image-based culture. This relationship has been vicious, shaping behavior modification and hyper-consumerism. Through my output of text and printed media, I question the compounding nature of these modes by materially challenging the process of printing. By forming images, videos, and phrases that seek our attention, I revise their methods of control.
Images are sticky; they inform us and we inform them. They are near-perfect reflections, not the real thing—a pipe is not a pipe. Through optimization and high-efficiency standards, they live pervasively among us as something faster, stronger, and shorter than the media that came before, often leading to a mass psychical confusion. Images have the power to progress culture but also to manipulate it. Images supplant memory, which in turn supplants history. I make images to question images; I make text to question text. Both of these staples of media “wound and seduce me.” I utilize current digital printing processes to actualize the work; by using the same technology, I revert their powers of reproduction to suit my needs of negation, while forcing these systems to participate in their own critique. Through processes of amalgamation, obfuscation, and erasure, I leave behind a document that requires meditation and prolonged viewing—in some cases, a document that reflects on our relationship to images and texts as viewers, in an effort to question our own presumptions. Within the present moment of media dominance, the attention industry, alternative facts, and individualization, I question how we have become submissive through a culture created by companies that trap users’ value for monetary or political gain. What kinds of separations have occurred between people in an ever-connected world? What kinds of projections do we see in others and ourselves? How have those consequences intruded into our offline minds?
I stack, blur, erase, age, and bleed the image to question its original power and create a tangible sensation. I continue to negotiate what to believe at any moment, when facts become obscured from multiple sources, and how to move forward with the weight of previous afterimages in contrast to the anxieties of future forecasts, in hopes of finding the human in the mirrored funhouse.
Moy received a BFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and a MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Moy has held exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Brussels and France.
david.moy.print(at)gmail.com