Dym Products, alter ego as a corporation. An unruly, oblique, queasily anti-consumption kind of corporation. My focal web presence was dymproducts.com; I didn't have a website under my given name until 2019.
It made sense to me to frame Dym Products as an umbrella corporation (and actually incorporated in California, 2013-2019) my projects as business units. Because although I could say I made installations or drawings, there were always other aspects to my work that got left out. And, ok, a chronic skepticism for the results of capitalism's mass production—sameness, descending quality, toxic materials. (I do have a love for nonsense invented "products," like 1970s Wacky Packages. That was part of it, too.)
Dym Products needed to go when I realized that what I wanted, now, was for human culture to embrace dematerialization. (Ha!) Making things, or even working with what exists already, under the guise of a corporation—or as myself—doesn't answer, feels distracting, not a useful means to think through something or convey thought.
A couple of the "business units," Dym | california textiles and Logo Removal Service, function more or less as businesses, have their own websites, and a bit of visibility on their own terms. (They both include products, services, and performance.) A third division, SubOptimal Systems, Products, Processes, loosely categorized as the Research & Development unit, was never especially public. It mostly involved me scratching my head, as I still do, at the way our economy requires us to extract, make, buy, get ride of so much material stuff. (SubOptimal Systems is part of "Use It All Up.") There's a terrific Philip K. Dick story, Autofac that anticipates this. (Read about Autofac and our current reality here—what google offered me when I looked for the story title.)
Dym Products 2012-18 // Dym Products, 2006-11 // Dym Products, 2002-6
With Logo Removal Service and SubOptimal Products, I repaired things, patched holes. The sewing, obsessively excessive, along with the optically vibrating fabric color choices inserted drawing, or non-paint painting, into conceptual projects. (All good painting is conceptual art.) Logo Removal depends on the combined specificity and arbitrariness in the strange shapes that evolved under my hands (i.e., subconscious-sewing-acts attention). Without these weird abstractions and challenging color combinations—related, perhaps, to paintings by Forest Bess or Marsden Hartley—the removals would have been "merely" utilitarian. With sewing and mending in lieu of pigment and canvas, this project visits feminist territory, while also questioning, however quixotically, capitalism's requirement to make vast quantities of identical cheap stuff.
A smaller, final division of Dym Products, Inc. included responding in pictures and writing—in collaboration with writer
Tom Clyde—to discoveries out in the world that caught my attention, mostly art, but also poetry and design.
Unused speculative hangtag (explanation below) 2016
Hangtag for fictional bag. // While earnestly creating products for craft marketplaces, I sometimes crafted anti-social hangtags to go with them—hangtags I wasn't brave enough to put on the products. Even micro-batches and one-offs are unneeded in a world with enough manufactured goods to last for multiple future generations. In early 2018, H&M alone had, they said, multiple billion tons of unsold (unsellable) clothing. We keep making things though. And loving the new and shiny.