The World of Interiors For more than fifteen years Erica Van Horn has collected, considered, cataloged, and displayed paper envelope interiors, creating a large-scale, ongoing art project that includes bookworks, collages and works on paper, public installations, and paper ephemera. "The only function of an envelope interior," Van Horn tells us, "is to hide the contents of the envelope." In focusing careful attention on this most invisible example of visual pattern and image, Van Horn reveals the irony of her statement even as she transforms the envelope interior's function. As what she calls "emblems of materiality and tactility" in an increasingly electronic world of information, Van Horn finds the continued use of content-obscuring envelopes "a cause of much surprise and wonder." The works in Van Horn's "World of Interiors" elevates a mundane and daily material to the category of fine art. The value Van Horn places on both the simple visual patterns and the very paper on which they are printed calls attention to the role of beauty in a world of disposable products and objects; by exposing the interiors of printed envelopes and repurposing them in works of art and books, Van Horn upsets our expectations about her seemingly ordinary materials and about fine art, printing, and books. By comparing her project to hobbies such as stamp collecting, Van Horn reminds us, too, that collecting can also be an art form, one that values daily practice, a careful eye, a completist sensibility. Van Horn makes an art not just of the envelope interiors she collects, but also of the activities of collecting and organizing them; the very process of making is part of Van Horn's artwork.
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Envelope Interiors, [Norfolk, England: Coracle, 1996] |
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Envelope Interior Reference File, [S.l.: s.n. 2007]
After more than a decade of collecting and making art with the patterned interiors of commercially printed envelopes, Van Horn created the Envelope Interior Reference File, a carefully organized index of her collection, including more than 500 letterpress printed file cards, each bearing a scrap of envelope interior paper. The cards are arranged by category, including headings such as “Red Words,” “Very Small Patterns,” “Airmail,” “Triangles,” and “Big,” each of which Van Horn has written on various section markers, thus allowing her own handwriting to become part of the pattern-scape of the file. “The building of the file index box announces the end of trying to keep track of the seemingly endless variations [of envelope interiors],” Van Horn has said of the Envelope Interior Reference File; “finding the descriptive headings to categorize various forms of zig-zags, and subtle differences has made me a bit crazy…. The box is covered with a blue buckram to approximate the colour most often used in the actual interiors.” |
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Envelope Interior Pin-Up Calendar, [Clonmel, Ireland]: Coracle, 1999 Beinecke Call Number: Zab V3115 999E
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Boy Bell's Book of Envelope Interiors, Docking, Norfolk, England: Coracle, 1994 |
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Erica Van Horn and Harry Gilonis, Envelope Interior Art History, [London]: Coracle, 1997 In this witty envelope interior album, Van Horn and her collaborator Harry Gilonis see the work of various important artists in a collection of repeated visual patterns; represented artists include abstract and conceptual artists, such as Jasper Johns and Sol LeWitt, alongside more classical artists, such as Gustave Caillebotte, whose famous painting Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877) is represented by a pattern depicting two figures walking under an umbrella.
Beinecke Call Number: Zab V3115 997E |
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Album of Interiors, Ireland: Coracle, 2008 |
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The World of Interiors Beinecke Call Number: Zab V3115 2006S |