About

The One Thousand Thousand project is an ongoing collaborative effort to produce one million pieces of original art. These pieces are also the most recent collaborative work from artists Jason McHenry and Christopher Dyer, whose past endeavors have included 52 Weeks and Holy Mackerel Press amongst others.

The idea behind One Thousand Thousand is to produce one million, hand-made, uniformly-sized, paintings without the aid of mechanical reproduction. A million paintings each done by hand.

McHenry and Dyer began producing these pieces in the current format (approximately 5.5” x 7”) in the late 1990s and have been continuing, at varying rates, ever since. Over the last year they renewed their commitment to the ongoing project and began their push towards the proverbial finish line. At their peak they produce hundreds and hundreds of pieces in a week and should their current rate of production be maintained and supported they may reach their goal before they die.

The cumulative total of the pieces in this edition is currently just shy of the 300,000 mark.  

Some Explanation With Regards to the Logistics

In producing the work for the One Thousand Thousand project it becomes clear that such an endeavor isn't very easy at all. In fact, it isn't even easy to fully consider how much work that must entail since a million of anything is sometimes difficult for people to readily grasp in the first place. It's one thousand times one thousand. 

Just consider the Bart Simpson-esque busywork of writing out some random sentence, over and over again, a thousand times. We can even whittle that down some by merely charging you with the task of writing out just your name. How long would it take for you to write your own signature on a piece of paper, over and over, until you reached a million?

Think of that and then consider that each signature should ideally be legible and clear while still possessing the same flourish and quality as the first one. It would take a long, long time and there would be other issues like the boredom and frustration you'd most certainly feel during the process. You'd have to stop for work or school or food or laundry. The cat would bother you and the dog would need to go for a walk. It'd make you crazy if you let it and chances are you'd be inclined to scrap the whole thing.

So making a million pieces of original art, one thousand thousand hand-made and individual paintings, is a big task. Each of the pieces should be presentable in their own solitary context and it defeats the purpose if you just slap a brush across a canvas and call it done. They have to be 'real' pieces of art or it doesn't count. You'd have to be able to look at each piece individually and want to own it for yourself and it'd need to be solid enough work to hold up by themselves and not just in the context of 999,999 other pieces in the edition. It's a tough and time-consuming task.

And just funding the project is another consideration. That much paint and supplies can get expensive. Even if you had unlimited time and unlimited money you'd still need to work on the logistical and additional monumental task of documenting that entire process. Keeping track of them all. That aspect alone can become a full time job.

Yeah? Well Show Me

So the documentation of the project. Keeping track of each piece is critical since you can't just go around saying that you were making a million paintings. You'd need to be able to prove it too. Besides, we're from Missouri, in case you didn't know that already, and that makes us uniquely qualified to be able to understand the need for documentation. And we document the hell out of these things.

We've got loads of documentation, in fact, and that part has become as much of a project as is making the individual pieces.

One of the very first things we committed to doing was completely cataloging each and every single piece. We make sure to assign a unique serial number to each one and they are also photographed and/or scanned. Each numbered entry is included in a database complete with descriptions of color, medium, materials, keywords, photos/scans, dates, times, locations, artists, batch size and all of the rest.

There is a custom-coded database that has been developed expressly for the purpose of making this process as fast and friendly as possible. [This is absolutely true.]

Whew.

We've done some similar things in the past in terms of keeping track of our work and the art and all of that. We're actually getting sort of good at doing things like this and now that we've hit some really big number and found some consistent stride for producing these things we're sure it'll be a lock in about one more year. You'll see. [We'll show you.]

52 Weeks

52 Weeks was another one of the collaborative effort of artists Jason McHenry and Christopher J. Dyer. The project began with the agreement to keep a journal for an entire year and it evolved into a yearlong visual diary and written daily journal presented in weekly increments. Each artist presented fifty-two boxes, for a total of one-hundred and four separate pieces.

The visual entries centered around pre-existing, 4×6×2 inch wooden shadow boxes each with a glass front. Found objects, ephemera, and original art were collected and manipulated over the week’s time to create distinct and personal assemblages.

Accompanying these visual entries are written journals specific to each artist. The written journals predominantly contain explicit documentation of the box contents, but also include writings and notations of a more introspective and creative nature.

The 52 Weeks project was exhibited in Seattle and was featured at Bumbershoot and then a local gallery. After the last opening every piece was sold out and the artists both left the state and never came back. They had not seen or spoken to one another for three years after that. [This is true.]