In March 2024, Detroit artists Dorota and Steve Coy bring their satirical, enigmatic brand of multimedia art to Toledo in an exhibition entitled “Cross Pollination.” The artist partners pose ethical and philosophical questions about social structures that inform how we live now, as well as proposing some thoughts on how we will navigate the future as a species. The vehicle for their investigation is a conceptual corporation called Hygienic Dress League—a multi-year, multi-media, ongoing art project.

A Brief History of the Hygienic Dress League Corporation

        A mural-sized advertisement for something called Hygienic Dress League appeared on city walls in downtown Detroit at the turn of the twenty-first century, immediately signaling that something was up. These “urban interventions,” as they were called by their creators, often featured a young couple in business dress, their faces obscured by industrial respirators. The image deftly suggested corporate dystopia, and indeed, that is what the principals of Hygienic Dress League Corporation (HDLC) were trying to communicate. Officially registered in the state of Michigan in 2007, this conceptual corporation has progressed through multiple iterations in service of their mission to brand and promote a new art form using street art, video, online platforms, magazines and newspapers, multimedia events, and installations.

 

        The recurring motifs that define HDLC’s corporate brand include industrial artifacts like bedazzled respirators, gilded shopping carts and televisions, mirror-encrusted fashion mannequins, and other objects that both fetishize and critique late-stage capitalism. Over time, as they have become more interested in environmental issues, pigeons, elephants, and rhinos, along with human/animal hybrids, have entered their visual vocabulary. Steve Coy describes the aesthetic of HDLC’s projects as “dystopian glamour.” Ultimately, the projects have become ever more ambitious in scale and have taken on a surrealist edge.

 

        In a somewhat ironic twist, the Coys have begun collaborating with corporations that are the subject of their social critique. In 2018, they cooperated with DTE Energy to realize their speculative vision in “Value Proposition,” transformingDTE Energy’s de-commissioned Connor’s Creek site in Detroit into a public art installation and three-day performance. Spirit of the Forest, with seven cast, bright red human/deer hybrids illuminated from below and emerging from the darkness, formed the centerpiece of the project. A striking light sculpture, Diamond II, levitated above the site. The project is only one of many that have been commissioned from Hygienic Dress League Corporation worldwide.

“Cross Pollination” at River House Arts in Toledo

        The objects on display now at River House Arts are a sampling from several of HDLC’s recent installations. The artists describe the collection of objects in the gallery as a kind of museum, or perhaps a mini retrospective, of their previous work. Tucked into a corner of the gallery, we find a video of Homosapien Goddess, a version of which was shown recently at Detroit’s Wasserman Projects in an extended installation called The Five Realms. A similar ram-headed female figure, The Deity, is now located in Port Austin, Michigan, as part of the 53 North Art Project.

 

        Also, from The Five Realms is a row of small artifacts embedded in stone-like substrates, displayed in wall-hung boxes. These Homosapien Fossils are disposable (and disposed of) artifacts—a plastic fork, a water bottle, a tiny Lego toy—from our human present re-imagined as precious objects that will be displayed and viewed by a future civilization.

        The idea that seems to animate the Coys in much of their work is the notion that human beings have been on the earth for only a moment in geological time. And that in some distant future when the human race has disappeared, an alien civilization will view and interpret—or misinterpret—the detritus of our culture. In the distant future, the time we experience in a linear fashion will be compressed into an eternal “now” in which a classical Greek bust will share a collapsed history with an industrial respirator. The idea is humorous in a way. “We love the symbolism of these culturally loaded objects,” Steve Coy says. “We kind of ride the line between, ‘Ah, we’re joking,’ and ‘no we’re very serious.’”

 

        HDLC’s musings on humanity’s past and present share gallery space with artworks proposing a hypothetical future. Several paintings are paired in two-part mini installations with editions of a classical Greek bust of a young man wearing a respirator. The medium-sized canvases depict skies, stylized suns, or gradient hues in improbably intense and unsettling saturated colors. Clouds and flowers are pixilated; nature is mediated by technology—shorthand for the Anthropocene. Another recurring image for the HDLC is an elongated, mirrored pyramid which first appeared in a 2021 installation at TOURISTS sculpture park in North Adams, Massachusetts, in collaboration with MASS MoCA. The archetypal apparition has now reappeared in the gallery as a skeletal gold-leafed portal in a painting entitled Cosmos Portal and in a digital video, Simulated Portal.

 

        For an audience new to Hygienic Dress Leagues Corporation’s art practice, “Cross Pollination” is an opportunity to become familiar with HDLC’s themes and methods, and it provides a glossary of images that will no doubt recur in their future cultural conversation.

 

“Cross Pollination” is on view from March 1-31, 2024, at River House Arts in Toledo, Ohio.

 

 

K.A. Letts is the Great Lakes Region editor of the New Art Examiner, a working artist (kalettsart.com) and art blogger (rustbeltarts.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.