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

Pamela Sneed’s Speaking Tongue opens at Dashwood Projects

November 15, 2024

Pamela Sneed’s latest exhibition, Speaking Tongue, will be on view at Dashwood Projects from November 20 to December 21. The show features twenty watercolor and ink paintings inspired by her recent trip to Kenya, where she was deeply moved by the elegance of giraffes, the landscapes, and the energy of Nairobi.

Blending her background as a poet and visual artist, Sneed’s work reflects on themes of identity, nature, and connection. Her paintings capture the beauty and spirit of the animals she encountered, alongside reflections on her own experiences as part of the African diaspora.

This exhibition marks Sneed’s first solo show with Dashwood Projects and will be accompanied by a new book, also titled Speaking Tongue, to be released in December.

By Enzo Holdt
Artworks by Pamela Sneed

Art

Tiebreaker - Alvin Armstrong

November 15, 2024

There is a moment of silence right before the play. Just before the racket strikes the ball as it hangs weightless in the air, breathless and charged. It’s the fleeting yet decisive instant that can alter the course of the match, determining who wins and who loses.

Alvin Armstrong depicts this crucial moment in his new exhibition Tiebreaker, symbolizing the risks and rewards of competition. It’s an implication of something else at stake, where athletes push not only their bodies, but their spirits to the absolute limit.

The dynamic figures embody the strength, grace, and agility juxtaposed by the vibrant color palette evoking not just the joy of competition but the charged energy of the court.

Tiebreaker is opening Thursday, November 16th at Anna Zorina Gallery.

By Rea Brayshaw
Artworks by Alvin Armstrong

Art

The Things People Are Ashamed To Take Photos Of: The Photography and Films of Yuhan Cheng

Yuhan’s latest exhibition of photo and video work titled 窗子外 Outside the Window, Inside the Tank 鱼缸里 takes its namesake from what could’ve been a mundane encounter. A month after moving to New York City from Chengdu, China, they stumbled across an abandoned fish tank left curbside. It reminded them of “the rotating fish in a tank that faded into the background of their mother’s home in Chengdu”, a thread connecting childhood familiarity that transformed into a symbol of greater significance in adulthood. A tank is a world within a world; a microcosm secluded from the broader chaos of the outside. Since then Yuhan has captured the other kinds of “fish tanks” closest to them in their photography and short films. Not literal ones necessarily– but intimate confined spaces in Chengdu and NYC where time stands still.

In the midst of taking snapshots of loved ones, Yuhan decided to turn their tender but examining lens on themselves. They realized shooting self-portraits unraveled a deeper understanding of their own nonbinary gender and queer sexuality. Yuhan admits in one of their short films “I hide from looking at my own body.” Yet, in the seclusion of their room which doubles as a dark room, Yuhan began to develop their first nude photos chronicling the subtle wounds; bitten cuticles, bruises, and scrapes they’ve accumulated involuntarily, once again documenting the things people choose to hide.

窗子外 Outside the Window, Inside the Tank 鱼缸里, debuted at FAR-NEAR Studio Hours a gallery in Chinatown focused on expanding the art world's view of Asia and Asian artists curated by Lulu Yao Gioiello. The event merged Yuhan’s works from the past three years, including 70 photographs, three short documentaries, and one installation. There was something uncanny about the gallery’s atmosphere – from the dollar store teal green curtains obscuring every window to the clusters of framed photos mimicking how photos of relatives are displayed in one’s childhood home, to the darkened lighting that was both disorienting and cozy. All these details were meticulously chosen to imitate the rooms depicted in Yuhan’s films and photography. In other words, the audience was invited to Yuhan’s “fishtank”, to share the odd balance of comfort and unease of being known intimately. We talked to Yuhan at Cafe Reggio to understand how their latest body of work came into being.

Initially, I was exploring my friends’ identities through the lens, but slowly, it became a tool to confront and understand my own queerness and gender identity.

Ora Margolis— Were any memories/childhood experiences you had in Chengdu important to how you've developed as an artist?

Yuhan Cheng— Growing up in Chengdu, especially in a military household, shaped and gave me a source of contention how I understood my identity. There was always a sense of conflict when it came to my body and feeling like I didn’t quite fit the expectations around me. This tension has been a driving force in my practice, pushing me to explore identity and belonging in my work.

Tell us a bit about your latest exhibition Outside the Window, Inside the Tank at Far. What headspace were you in when taking these photos?

YC— Outside the Window, Inside the Tank is about the fluidity of self; our bodies, our environments, and our identities. The idea of water as both a symbol of confinement and freedom is central to the photos and film that comprise the exhibit. This fluidity much like how I see my experience moving between Chengdu and New York, where similar feelings follow me no matter where I am. Water mirrors the body, the frame, and the room, which are all containers of the self.

Previously, you’ve said you wanted the exhibition space to look "like your room". How did you make that happen and why is your NYC room important to you?

YC— My room in NYC is an extension of my identity. It’s where I feel vulnerable and where I explore myself most openly. It’s a manifestation of my sense of self. I recreated certain elements in the exhibition—the green sheer curtains, the dollar store shower curtain with bubbles, and the center installation depicted a self-portrait deteriorating in water, reminiscent of a fish in a tank. This room, like any other room or container, magnifies the tension of self-exploration.

Has your idea or comfort with your gender identity and /sexuality changed since you’ve delved into photography?

YC— Yes. The process of photography and filming has been a mirror to my own understanding of self. Initially, I was exploring my friends’ identities through the lens, but slowly, it became a tool to confront and understand my own queerness and gender identity. The process of photographing my queer friends and then myself allowed me to come to terms with who I am.

How did you and Lulu Yao of FAR-NEAR Studio meet, and what makes her a good collaborator?

YC— We first connected when I reached out with my series Princess of Funan River. Lulu understood the struggles and complexities in the work and she invited me to expand on those ideas with her. Our collaboration has worked because Lulu truly resonates with the themes I’m drawn to, like fluidity, transformation, and the intimacy of navigating belonging.

After completing Fish Tank and Remnants of an Amateur Film, what kind of movie do you want to make next?

YC— Right now, I’m more focused on writing. I need to understand what I want to say before making another film. Writing helps me find clarity;it’s a crucial part of my process.

What kind of camera do you use and why?

YC— I use a Canon AE-1. I started with it and I still love it. It's small, spontaneous, easy to use, and light. It allows me to capture moments naturally without overthinking.

What's your biggest fear?

YC— Being disconnected from my sense of self, from others, and from the things I love.

When do you feel most like yourself?

YC— It’s during those fleeting moments when I complete a project. That feeling fades quickly, leaving me searching for the next project to reconnect with that sense of fulfillment.

How do you want people to feel when they interact with your art?

YC— I want them to feel whatever resonates with them. I don’t want to prescribe the experience; it should feel right for each person.

Your work focuses on the close knit communities that surround you or various metaphorical “fish tanks”. What communities do you feel closest to?
YC— The queer artist community, both in Chengdu and NYC, has been a source of comfort and understanding for me. There’s something about shared struggles and shared creative language that feels like home.

What's the biggest difference between living life as a queer artist in NYC and in Chengdu?

YC— In both NYC and Chengdu, I’m learning more about myself. NYC offers a sense of freedom, while Chengdu is home, a place of comfort and history. Neither place defines me but both are significant parts of my path.

What are your next moves/goals?

YC— I want to continue exploring both film and photography, expanding my narrative style and experimenting across mediums. During my show, I found new ways of seeing my photographs such as by adding a window screen between frames or letting a self-portrait fade and grow mold in water. These approaches allowed me to see my work not just as 2D images but as 3D objects.

I want to keep pushing the boundaries of how photo and film can interact, and I’m also interested in trying photojournalism. My focus remains on collaborating across mediums and continuing to accumulate experiences that I can translate into sincere honest work.