Dystopian Glamour

October 02, 2018

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Diamonds never fade. Diamonds are forever.

Or are they? The new project by Steven and Dorota Coy (aka Hygienec Dress League) in Detroit strikes doubt in the hearts of those who worship at the altar of bling. Their gigantic diamond-shaped light sculpture, "Diamond II" is placed on a waterfront in Detroit to drive home the point that water is, in fact, more valuable than diamonds (one would think).

Questions of value echo throughout—a 600-pound elephant sculpture covered in aurora borealis rhinestones continues the artists’ ongoing aesthetic negotiation with the animal world, as well as their immersive installation of deer-headed people, "Spirit of the Forest." Though their work is full of whimsy, it's also backed by startling notions of what, exactly, corporations are up to.

office had a tete-a-tete with the duo to get to the bottom of it.

Interview by John Martin Tilley

Tell me about your work.

Steve: Dorota and I met in Kaui in 2004 when I was going to grad school out there. We started collaborating on all these art projects and decided Hawaii wasn’t going to give us the platform or backdrop for the type of work that we wanted to do. So, we decided we wanted to move to one of the post-industrial cities—Baltimore, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, even Buffalo was on the list—but Detroit was where I grew up. So, in 2007, we got a place that was really cheap—it was $250 a month for this big warehouse space in Eastern Market. We then started a corporation that same year—we legally registered the corporation as a new and original form of art. We wanted to use it as a platform for critiquing corporatism, advertising influence, value and identity, and branding. It’s a conceptual art project and we wanted to create art under this label. We thought it would be funny if the corporation created nothing, had no profit, and created these ‘interventions’ under this name.

Does the corporation still exist?

Steve: Yeah, it’s a legal entity. We aired a TV commercial once. It’s like aesthetic relationalism—you’re sitting there, you’re watching TV, and all of the sudden, we appropriate your TV and you become a part of this performance, a part of this moment. It was funny because we were appropriating these moments that corporations try to use to influence you. We went in and basically—I don’t know how to put it.

You stole time, in a way.

Dorota: Right, we just used the TV as our medium. We were trying to do what corporations do, and how they influence people, and how they push their agenda on people, and we kind of appropriated that space. We used street art to do the same thing.

Steve: We saw it as performative, where you become a part of the moment—and it’s not that much different from our unsuspecting public work where, suddenly, you’re a part of it. The reason we love street art and public art is that moment when you’re walking down the street and you see something you didn’t expect, and it kind of changes your way a little bit. That’s the kind of work we’re really into. Through the corporation we see each project as building upon this narrative—one piece might be about one thing, another piece about something slightly different, but as a whole, they connect through this conceptual narrative that is our brand.

Above: Steve and Dorota Coy at DTE Decommissioned Power Plant and 'Diamond II.'

Do you feel like this project was a departure for you?

Steve: Maybe only in medium—otherwise, not really. It’s still in a post-industrial context, things that have been left behind, forgotten. We did this farm piece in rural Michigan and it was a departure from our traditional context, but the meaning was still there. We like to appropriate all that environment to contextualize our work.

It’s interesting too, to think about a corporation as an entity. I love the idea of a corporation as a person, but it’s not a real person. Do you feel like you play into that?

Steve: We love the anonymity that rides behind that. It’s one of those places where art and law coexist in a weird way, as well as commercialism and branding. You can look it up in the state of Michigan, it’s there legally registered. We have shares allocated for our corporation, we have bylaws written up and articles for the corporation. We’re eventually going to sell shares of this corporation as another public performance art piece.

So is the product the performance itself?

Steve: Exactly. It’s performative. People can own the share of nothing, but the reality is that it starts to play into questions of what value even is. Is there value in these cultural artifacts that we’re creating?

So, it’s kind of like the diamond piece you did for the city, where it seems valuable, but we can’t really take part in it other than looking at it.

Steve: Yeah, we play into those tensions. This piece does that more than anything—riding those lines between really crazy aesthetic beauty, on an art level there’s potential value there, like a cultural value, challenging society, but the diamond as a symbol is exactly what you said: is there any real value or is it perceived value that’s been ingrained into society? Is it merely something people believe is valuable because a corporation told you that because they want to sell it to you?

Especially now that they can make diamonds, so it’s almost like a corporate object in and of itself.

Steve: Yeah and I think it’s naturally embedded into us, too—when you get engaged you get a diamond, right?

Dorota: It’s the idea of corporations using branding to sell more—so we’re using the same kind of ideas.

Steve: They’re completely manipulating society. It’s no different than the way magazines might treat the way women are supposed to look.

When you hear people say, ‘We need to save the planet,’ I think what they’re really talking about is saving ourselves.

So, how do you feel like you are manipulating society?

Dorota: I don’t think we’re trying to manipulate society, I think we’re bringing things to attention—that you can look at things differently than what you’ve been told.

Steve: I think we’re calling out the absurdities. We’re being subversive. We’re being playful—there’s a lot of fun in this. There are these very serious undertones, and we talk about that with the elephant, but there’s also this absurdness and playfulness—like our pigeons. We find them to be these beautiful animals who have adapted to city life, but so many people view them as an ugly, filthy, stupid animal.

It seems like you have a really interesting connection to nature. I looked at your Tumblr, and most of your work uses animals in some way.

Steve: There’s a tension, I think, between profit and sustainability and the planet, and also, I think on a broader note, we’re starting to question what does it mean to be a human, what do we need, what are we doing and why are we doing it? The weird thing is, when you hear people say, ‘We need to save the planet,’ I think what they’re really talking about is saving ourselves—the planet is going to survive. Humans can die off and the planet will rebound and regrow without us. So, we need to find a balance with nature, somehow. If we use all of our resources, there will be nothing left.

Dorota: In Detroit, and post-industrial cities all over the US, they’re faced with infrastructure issues, like water, for example. Detroit public schools this year shut off all the water in all the schools because there was too much lead and other things in it. And Flint, as you know, was faced with the same issue. So, all those things are something we’re inadvertently pointing t—owe don’t directly call it out, but we’re thinking about these things. What is real value? All those things corporations are selling to us in front of children, in front of people, to get more and more things that we don’t really need in society.

Steve: And it feels too much like profit-over-people. Is there a way we can reposition everything where value is more human, instead of a form of money to corporations?

Dorota: And humans overall—we all want to live a very good, healthy life, and maybe there’s a better balance to all of that. So, I think in a playful way, maybe that’s what we’re trying to say.

Steve: Those are the undertones, those are what are embedded. People can look at it and say, 'Oh that’s a pretty object,' or they can think about the deeper hidden meanings behind it. So, for this new project we really moved into sculptural installation and we love it, and I’ve been starting to think about it, and I feel like there’s a bit of surrealism in the work, as well. Somebody was asking what our style is, and the only thing we could really come up with was ‘dystopian glamor.’ There’s this bit of futurism that’s in the work, but it’s more of like a dystopian society.

It’s almost sci-fi.

Steve: Exactly. There’s a bit of sci-fi in there—these animal people walking around. We were thinking about augmentations of reality a bit. You stumble upon the sculptures and you feel like you could be in this alternate reality. You build the tension between that glamor and this dystopia—it’s this weird thing, the layers of meaning. It’s something so beautiful, but it’s beautiful because it’s sparkly. Why do we find sparkly things beautiful? Is that an inherently human thing? Or is that something that’s been programmed by society?

Above: 'Spirit of the Forest' and 'Limited Edition,' all photos by Jon Deboer.

'Value Proposition' by Hygienic Dress League will be open to the public from October 18 through October 21, 2018, from 6PM to 10PM in Detroit. Register here.

Art

Texas / Yeshiva

Interested in the human psyche and subjects of community, faith, and spirituality, Thunder recollects and recreates her personal experiences from photographs she's taken. Her practice involves making inkjet color prints of the photos while the printer is low on ink, so that the CYM colors take precedence over the black. She uses the obscured palette to predict unusual coloring in her paintings.

While referenced from real places she’s been, her creations often feel otherworldly, as if she taps into "something bigger than herself" that speaks to "the audience and collective consciousness." The surrealistic scenes based on real moments embody how memories are fragmented, even distorted, as time passes and surroundings change.

This new body of work, inspired by photographs taken at a street parade in Corpus Christi, Texas, and at an all-boys Yeshiva boarding school in Westchester, New York, explores the subject of duality by placing two seemingly unrelated series of paintings in conversation. Fascinated by the energy generated by intentional gatherings of people, whether it’s a street parade or a religious boarding school, Thunder explores this elevated frequency of experience and synergy.

“As someone who spent their formative years in two drastically different communities and environments, it felt natural to investigate these two subjects simultaneously. It’s been a journey for me as an artist to embrace this ‘split’ in my identity through my work and begin turning inwards for information while creating rather than relying on it externally," says Thunder.

In these series of oil paintings, the settings and their interpretation are both visually and aesthetically distinguishable: vibrant and crowded, solemn and deserted. The Yeshiva series serve as an escape from the works in the Parade and Cotillion series, which center around materialism and contemporary social culture.

Texas / Yeshiva is on view through February 18, 2023.

Art

Ceramics, Sushi and Flowers with Darren Romanelli

Off the bat speaking with Romanelli and discussing the projects he's put forth thus far and plans on producing in the near and far future, I notice his humility — an impressive quality for anyone to hold onto at his level of acclaim. He seems to love true collaboration, the idea of building and upholding community, his family both blood and creative, and eagerly dishing out credit to those both in his orbit and beyond. His home is further testiment to his level of support: the walls and surfaces are filled with a mix of rising and well known artists he has come aross, worked or traded with. Another thing I recognize immediately is that Romanelli loves Los Angeles. He tells me about his neighborhood, the surrounding area of Griffith Park, what it means to him and how it's influenced his work, driving him to bring and build projects in the area. With a level of excitement I wish I could better portray with my words alone, Romanelli regaled me with the story of his next foray into curation, which involved a few of the things, or rather the people, he'd been working with and inspired by as of late.

Firstly, came the medium closest to home: ceramics, which his wife Candice Romanelli has been masterfully creating in their own kiln. Next, he wanted to focus on flowers and floral arrangements, which he had been drawn to since happening upon the traditional Japanese florist Toyo down the block. Finally, he hoped to weave the art of sushi making into the mix, an endeavor Romanelli has been involved in on both small and large scales for a few years. And with all of the eccentric brilliance he is deservingly known for, Romanelli brilliantly staged a very special night in Los Angeles last week that seamlessly and respectfully connected these three art forms with nothing but grace.

Ahead of the holidays, for one night, the historic Toyo Florist's flower freezer became a sushi kitchen catering to an evening in celebration of the list of local and renound artists that Romanelli had curated to create ceramic "vessels" which would hold floral arrangements made specifically and on the spot for each piece of pottery, by the family who has owned the Toyo shop for over 72 years. Standing by the edge of it all, on such an inherently Los Angeles night, I observed Romanelli's community of incredible local artists, designers and musicians as they mingled in a physical space itself so drenched in history and cultural significance, surrounded by the array of arcane and modernized mediums in a casual, though incredibly thoughtful and conscious manner.

Over the fresh toro, in the glow of the florist shop lights, Romanelli spoke to how he came to love and know Toyo, telling me, "I discovered the shop while driving by over a year ago, I started buying flowers from them pretty regularly, I was so impressed with their selection and staging abilities. We quickly developed a dialogue. One day, Sandy invited me in the back to visit their flower freezer, and I was impressed with their amazing selection. She explained to me they grow a lot of their greenery on a nearby field. I asked her if I could host a holiday ceramic sale over the month of December… It’s all been really organic… I do the sushi at Sofi stadium for Rams and chargers etc. and the brand was incubated in a freezer space in downtown LA so the idea of having sushi experience in the Flower freezer."

Speaking to Sandy, a member of Toyo's founding family and runs the shop today and was creating said arrangements on the night of the event, she told me, "Toyo has been in business for over 72 years. Where the Los Feliz estates area is currently was where our former flower fields were. My grandparents and father grew flowers and provided wholesale to the Los Angeles Flower Market in Downtown LA. That market had all Japanese growers and my family participated, but we went into strictly retail when a developer bought the fields. In the meantime, my grandparents were interned in the WWII Japanese relocation camps.

...They were released when the war ended and continued the retail flower business — and here we are still. Then my father was drafted to the Vietnam War — even though he wasn't a citizen! Thankfully he lived. Afterwards, he came back and continued the business, and now I myself do the same. Our family managed to go through, live through, and move on from war, from internment on domestic soil/homeland after being unfairly drafted and forced to fight in one of the most fatal wars in history. And thereafter, figure out a way to move on. The floral business was, and is, our family niche. We love it."

Say what you will about what the idea of a "collaboration" means in popular culture these days, this night proved to me that there is still substance to the word — and when it's done right, the potential of that special space where ideas and crafts overlap is infinite.

Art

Objects of Desire: AI Sex Toys in The Art World

December 19, 2022

With recent conversation on social media about the complicated and controversial relationship between art and technology — and the inherent intimacy of it all — artist Pleun van Dijk is flipping the script, so to speak, and using AI to design photorealistic sex toys. In her latest project, Objects of Desire, Pleun investigates our connection to technology through an object we have a close phyiscal relationship with as a form of sexual objectification.

“With the current exponential speed at which technology develops, the thin line between human and technology will continue to blur and might eventually even fully disappear,” Pleun van Dijk said. As integration between the human and non-human advance, we will be confronted with “ethical and fundamental questions” to define our species and what will become of us.

Text by India Espy-Jones
Photos by Bram Van Dijk

In a three-step process, the artist dissolves the distinction between what is real and fake. Pleun translates the relationship between humans and the tool we created, technology, into a tangible scenario of the thin line which separates us two.

In step one, she developed a dataset to contain an input of realistic, human genetalia-like and abstract sex toys. An object in which we have formed a close physical relationship with, to the extent many are designed to replicate our body’s most intimate organs. Which then in step two, the images are fed into a “pre-trained machine learning (ML) model” to generate “a collection of 1,000 new, non-existing shapes” derived from the initial sex toy dataset. In this step, human and technology morph into one.

In step three, the final step, the images generated from the ML model were rendered into a three-dimensional physical reality with the final product an anthropomorphic, human-like sculpture, the embryo of human and technology. “The project confronts the viewer with a speculative scenario and leaves them to decide whether they perceive the outcome as human, non-human or something that exists in between,” Pleun van Dijk said.

Check out our office-excliusive preview of Phase I of their immersive, intimate project below.