Back in November SFMOMA presented Everything Is Perfect by Kateřina Šedá as part of their multisite exhibition Project Los Altos. Kateřina's project centered around the idea of celebrating the everyday attributes that make each of us unique.

There were categories that covered just about everything and the art-related records had quite a few nominees already and at first I didn't want to include the One Thousand Thousand project. It felt crummy to think of competing with other artists for whatever reason. So I went with my monkeys.

And you can't lose when you go with your monkeys.

The SFMOMA closing reception thing was this weekend and I went to that. Part of the Everything is Perfect project included the publication of a little book that included all the records. And these books were just terrific. They each had a different cover with the photo of the respective record. Just incredibly well done.

Kateřina was gracious enough to insist that the One Thousand Thousand project also be included and we settled on the record of Longest-Running Art Project. 

I found this old sketch I'd done of the Leshan Buddha and figured it might be nice to try and use it to print over some of the One Thousand Thousand pieces that needed something more to be finished.

The results were not the best but I learned a lot about the process. And that's what counts mostly.

The white pieces that I printed over were sort of doomed from the start. I came close to trashing the whole set and that's something I haven't done in a long, long time. 

I eventually left them out in the yard where they baked in the sun and they were warped and covered in layers of assorted paints.

So they weren't the best candidates to use to print over. 

The test prints that were done on paper turned out okay. The image was a bit too complicated and didn't burn properly but I like that part of it.

Anyway, here are some from that experiment.

It's never been easy documenting the One Thousand Thousand project and in some ways producing the pieces is the easy part.

Seems like when there is a big exhibition of the project we tend to get into some more hyper-focused mindset and really do a more thorough inventory of the past pieces. Make sure everything is scanned and numbered and accounted for.

In preparation for the recent show Christopher sent some of the pieces he had and I've been scanning those over the last week or so.

These are from 2010 and I'm not sure they've been scanned before now.

A few artists and their work and ideas were kind of instrumental in inspiring the One Thousand Thousand project and Ray Johnson was certainly one of them. 

A quote from a new article I'm bookmarking:

In the 1950s, the Conceptual and Pop artist Ray Johnson pioneered the practice of mail art, in which he would send artworks to friends and acquaintances via the US Postal Service, asking the recipients to add to or alter his work and then send it to someone else. As Jeanne Marie Kusinan so aptly put it in her 2005 Contemporary Aesthetics article, “The Evolution and Revolutions of the Networked Art Aesthetic,”

[Johnson’s mail art was a reaction against] the official art world, with its institutional hierarchies and gallery elitism [representing] a fundamental move away from the paradigm of art produced to sell or own. This was art to give, send, and potentially lose or destroy by the very process of mailing.

For Johnson, the process was the art; the object was just a byproduct. As Johnson’s work shifted away from object-oriented art towards this more conceptual, collaborative form of art-making, the fact that his mail art was never supposed to be sold brought up many new questions, such as: How can one collect an object as an artwork when the work is actually a series of events taking place over time?

Compared to the problem faced by today’s digital artists, Johnson encountered the opposite: his work was not supposed to be collected in the traditional sense, but some people collected or sold the pieces created by the mail art network, regardless of his creative intention. Since physical objects existed, the official art world desired them; the allure of the art object cannot be denied, for better or worse. 

[I just figured I'd bookmark this out loud.]

Some recent pieces were made especially for an event held by the Silicon Valley Symphony Orchestra. Some symphony-related images were printed over some pieces and the results were sort of mixed.

There were three separate types of printing techniques used and the surfaces that were printed on were widely varied. 

Another small handful of pieces were done using an image transfer technique and then hand-painted and colored afterward. 

Still, the experimentation is a bulk of the fun and the results are okay too. I think.

In preparation for SubZERO Festival I made sure to scan all of the pieces that were being shown. I'm just now getting around to cropping them and all the rest.

This is batch one of many. 

Scanning is a total drag.

I've never been much of a video game kind of person and haven't played anything close to one in years and years. Last year I was invited to play Ingress before it was in open release and have been playing it ever since.

If you're not familiar with it the game is basically an overlay for Google Maps that shows specific locations in your immediate area. These locations are primarily public art, murals, sculptures, significant architecture and other unique and notable places. 

You can read a lot more about it HERE but It's a remarkably cool way to interact with your environment and as an artist and an heroic lover of art it's especially cool. You'll absolutely discover things in your neighborhood and city that you've never noticed before and the game allows for information about the respective locations to be added. Plus you'll have to physically walk around a whole lot and I'm seriously down two belt sizes from last year.

Ingress is a totally free app and is currently available for Android devices and should be ready for iPhone release very, very soon. And you should totally choose to join the Enlightened faction. 

And KALEID Gallery in San Jose is one of those portals. And so it the One Thousand Thousand project. 

So, for example, this painting on a utility box in San Jose is titled Oso's Rebirth.

Clicking on that image brings up additional photos as well as some information on the artist. You can add to this information as well and in some way this game has the potential to become a decent database of art.

Some additional portal locations:

I've been getting sort of stuck lately and when that happens I know from experience that this usually means it's time for me to move on to some new set of materials or medium. I've been in this really bold and graphic stage for a while now and really want to do something else.

I have been looking at using some little sheets of balsa wood in some way and had done one or two pieces a bit ago where I tried my hand at it. I tried it out again on a couple of pieces from this little set I did on June 3, 2014.

The texture and the added depth that the thin sheet of balsa wood adds is really pleasing to me and the one at left is one of the pieces I've ended up keeping for myself. 

I used some more beeswax on this set too and that cool mint green color is the beeswax. I added some weird clear coat to areas of these too and that gave me some good ideas as well. I've included a few overview photos of the set as it was being completed and I really like them placed together as a larger piece.

Ultimately this whole project is just a long series of little experiments with color and texture and composition and media and this set in particular is a nice example of this fact. 

I'm frequently undecided as to what I feel about them all but I'm invariably grateful for the chance to have something to look at that serves as some road map to future work.

The individual pieces and the overview photos are posted just below.

Some of the more recent sets were done with the idea that they'd be really simple. I have been working on this project with the Silicon Valley Music Festival and have been producing some pieces that eventually lend well to the idea of music. 

Some of the pieces produced for this side project will be printed over with linocuts of different images relating to the symphony performances where I painted on site. You can see what I'm talking about HERE.

So some of these things were intended to be completed just to a point and they'd be finished by adding some additional graphic elements to them later on. 

But in looking over some of the sets I just kind of like them as they are. They feel a lot more delicate than a whole lot of the super-vivid graphic stuff that has been some unintentional theme for me over the last few months.

So I'm going to the print studio tonight and taking a lot of these with me. Not sure if I'll print over them or not.

Although some of the more bold pieces I know are as finished as they're ever going to be.

And you should totally come to see all the new work at the SubZERO Festival in San Jose this weekend. We'll be showing thousands of the most recent pieces and work produced for the Silicon Valley Music Festival will be available at their event held at The Sliding Door Company. 

No kidding. If you're in the area and you don't come down to SubZERO Festival this weekend you're seriously missing out. [And it's two days this year. Friday and Saturday.]