hygienic dress league featured in Detropia
hygienic dress league, an art project by Steve Coy (BFA 2001) in collaboration with his wife Dorota, was featured in Detropia, a documentary film about Detroit that premiered at Sundance.
hygienic dress league (HDL) is an ongoing public art project by husband and wife duo Steve and Dorota Coy that uses a corporation (officially registered in the state of Michigan) as a new and original form of art. HDL, headquartered in Detroit, uses traditional and non-traditional modes of advertising such as street art, internet, video sharing websites, hype, word of mouth, magazines and newspapers as well as other media outlets. HDL billboards and signs activate abandoned structures in post-industrial areas and cleverly draw meaning from their locations. These various marketing tactics are used to disseminate its “Brand” and create a social identity, while delivering a fantasy narrative through an interrelated multi experiential art project to an unsuspecting public audience.
DETROPIA is a cinematic tapestry that chronicles the lives of several Detroiters trying to survive the D and make sense of what is happening to their city. An owner of a blues bar, a young blogger, an auto union rep, a group of young artists, an opera impresario and a gang of illegal “scrappers” make up an unlikely chorus that illuminates the tale of both city and a country in a soul searching mood, desperate for a new identity. Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century– the Great Migration of African Americans escaping Jim Crow; the rise of manufacturing and the middle class; the love affair with automobiles; the flowering of the American dream; and now … the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos. With its vivid, painterly palette and haunting score, DETROPIA sculpts a dreamlike collage of a grand city teetering on the brink of dissolution. As houses are demolished by the thousands, automobile-company wages plummet, institutions crumble, and tourists gawk at the “charming decay,” the film’s vibrant, gutsy characters glow and erupt like flames from the ashes. These soulful pragmatists and stalwart philosophers strive to make ends meet and make sense of it all, refusing to abandon hope or resistance. Their grit and pluck embody the spirit of the Motor City as it struggles to survive postindustrial America and begins to envision a radically different future.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/story/2012 – 01-21/detropia-detroit-economy-crisis/52725988/1