TR Ericsson’s mother committed suicide in 2003. She was cremated with a copy of her favorite book, American Tragedy, whose cover serves as the visual source material for this unique silkscreen, which also incorporates her funerary ashes. Serving as a portrait of his mother through the objects she loved, it also represents the dark underbelly and disappointments of the American dream, an inversion of the promise and optimism inherent in the landscape tradition referenced on the book’s cover. The work was acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art where it hangs in the permanent collection of this encyclopedic museum. According to the artist, “I am in the process of not only spreading my mother’s ashes into private and institutional frameworks but more importantly spreading her life story. She was uniquely able to receive others, to listen and provide comfort in the harshest and most difficulty moments of personal pain. I consider every work I’ve made about her, or of her, as a symbol of her love, devotion and selflessness. Lessons our world desperately needs.”