T.R. Ericsson creates haunting images through elaborate silkscreen and photographic processes. His series of photographs titled “Etant Donnés 2” (2010), in homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés (1946-66), depicted a nude woman in unusual outdoor surroundings—lying in shallow water, for instance. With her face never clearly visible and her body often sprawling over twigs and brush, at first glance the photo-based images suggest a crime scene; however, Ericsson, like Duchamp before him, is exploring ideas of love. Likewise, the series “Nicotine Dreams” (2008) references familial love and mortality, inspired by the artist’s mother’s terminal years. Smoldering cigarettes placed beneath silkscreens allow the nicotine to create pictorial stains while destroying the screen, resulting in golden-hued, nostalgic images of a Christmas tree, a house, and other sentimental imagery. The pungent smell emitted by the drawings reinforces the bitterness of the artist’s memories.
This is the first monograph dedicated to contemporary artist TR Ericsson (b. 1972), who with conceptual rigor and emotional directness uses the archives chronicling his family’s painful past to explore the healing powers of commemoration and memory. He grapples with these archival materials’ power to define both the past and future, even as they vanish slowly with time. In a poignant family chronology in text and images, Ericsson includes many photographs of his mother—whose suicide at age 57 was a traumatic turning point in his life and career—along with related photographs, documents, writings, film stills, and artifacts dating back to the 1930s. Two scholarly essays set Ericsson’s work into its artistic and broader cultural context. The complete publication is both a guide to the artist’s work and an inspired chronicle of several generations of a Midwestern family, evoking universal themes of love and loss.
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