Conceptual artist Jessica Vaughn wins new Frieze prize, will bring mail art project to New York fair

Mail artwork followers visiting subsequent month’s Frieze New York (17-21 Could) at The Shed are in for a deal with: the honest will characteristic a particular fee by New York-based conceptual artist Jessica Vaughn primarily based on her three-year exploration of the USA Postal Service (USPS).

Vaughn is the winner of the inaugural Frieze Artadia Prize, which recognises the work of a New York-based artist who has beforehand obtained an award from Artadia, a non-profit that provides grants to artists in cities throughout the US, from Boston to San Francisco. Winners of the brand new prize will obtain assist to create a brand new fee to be proven throughout Frieze New York.

Vaughn’s fee will include photos from her three-year mail artwork undertaking, The Web of Issues (2020-23). For the undertaking, the artist mailed letters to websites all through the US affiliated with commerce, violence or leisure, from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to workplaces in Silicon Valley and the gated group in Florida the place teenager Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012. Vaughn intentionally mislabeled every envelope in order that it could finally be returned to her, baring the assorted marks, stamps and notes of the USPS.

“I used to be thinking about all of those websites, which when thought-about collectively, represent a conceptual panorama that reorients how American life is pictured, felt and structured,” Vaughn says in an announcement. She provides that, by printing photos of the envelopes’ exteriors and interiors onto canvas and linen, she sees the undertaking as a “revisioning of the traditions of panorama portray”.

Vaughn’s proposal was chosen by the prize’s jurors, SculptureCenter director Sohrab Mohebbi and Pérez Artwork Museum Miami director Franklin Sirmans.

“We’re excited to focus on Jessica Vaughn and her incisive interrogation of the institutional politics of labour—on this case, the USA Postal Service—which can culminate on this large-scale fee, which is such a becoming platform for the general public to expertise and mirror on,” Artadia’s government director Carolyn Ramo says in an announcement.

The show of Vaughn’s work at Frieze New York will coincide with the closing days of her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, I 🖤 CUSTOMERS (till 21 Could), at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf. That exhibition options new and up to date works that, typical of the artist’s apply, focus viewers’ attentions on the often-overlooked processes and materials traces of labour, from the knowledge and repair sectors to industrial manufacturing.

Such prizes have lengthy been hallmarks of Frieze’s numerous festivals. As an example, at Frieze Los Angeles in February, the Mexican American artist Narsiso Martinez gained the $25,000 Frieze Affect Award and was given a solo stand on the honest. Final October, Abbas Zahedi gained the Frieze Artist Award and offered a undertaking on the grounds of Regent’s Park throughout Frieze London.