Last week during Frieze New York, between floors of the fair installed at The Shed, hung the installation “The Internet of Things” by Jessica Vaughn spanning forty feet across. Unmissable as visitors to the fair rode up and down the escalators, it consisted of blown-up letters and envelopes, intentionally mislabeled by the artist and returned to sender.
The work was the result of the very first Frieze Artadia Prize, wherein the non-profit offered a New York-based artist a chance to realize a major public work at Frieze New York. Vaughn’s project was selected by jurors Sohrab Mohebbi of SculptureCenter and Franklin Sirmans of PAMM. The artist shared with Whitewall, ahead of the fair’s opening, more about the process behind “The Internet of Things” and how it ties together sites of commerce, capitalism, leisure, and violence.
WHITEWALL: “The Internet of Things” stems from a multi-year process of mailing letters through the USPS to various locations in the U.S. What was the starting point for this project?
JESSICA VAUGHN: I wanted to create an artwork that pushes the social and political understanding of the American landscape by way of the systems, commerce, labor and infrastructure that define it.
WW: How were the locations of the letters chosen? Are there actual letters within each envelope?
JV: The project involved sending mail through the USPS to historical and contemporary sites of leisure and commerce, as well as places where acts of violence have occurred. I wanted to choose both contemporary and historical locations from across the United States that were in conversation with. There was a letter inside requesting the sender to return the mail to sender.
WW: You intentionally mislabeled the envelopes, so they would be returned. What kind of markings did they bear when they were returned to you?
JV: Marks left on the envelopes included handwritten acronyms like “NSN” (no such number), stamps that read “unable to locate” and marks leftover from machine processing, like barcodes. These are systematic markings used by the postal service to identify and sort addresses to their destination
WW: How were those returned letters transformed into the work seen at Frieze New York?
JV: The front and back of these envelopes were digitally scanned and then digitally printed on canvas and linen.
WW: What kind of impression did you want to convey, bringing together all these letters, these addresses, these sites together?
JV: The post office became this way of thinking about site in a very particular way. I wanted to emphasize different sites coming together, where the body is marked through particular historical and contemporary moments. And of course there is a relationship between manual and mechanized labor that happens within the infrastructure of the post office.
WW: How does the site of “The Internet of Things” — at an art fair in New York, add to the interpretation of the piece?
JV: The fair itself acts as both a site of leisure and commerce in this contemporary moment.
WW: How did this inaugural Frieze Artadia Prize, allow you to better realize this project?
JV: Working with Frieze and Artadia allowed me to digitally print a large number of images for this installation and to as well imagine this project at a large scale. The wall at the fair covers roughly 19 x 40 feet.
