TR Ericsson

Nicotine is poison, but so is looking back. One of the first bodies of work TR Ericsson made after his mother passed was a series of images created with the brand of cigarettes she chain smoked towards the end of her life. The artist recalls wanting to make a portrait of his mother through the materials that were close to her. He began with cigarettes and photographs creating a haunting series on nostalgia, poison and mortality.

For these works, Ericsson uses a silkscreen process, essentially an intensified version of the process through which his mother's white ceiling became stained yellow in the final years of her life. Digital photographs are burned into silkscreens. Subsequently the images are recreated in nicotine as ashtrays filled with smoldering cigarettes are placed beneath the screens, slowly creating pictorial stains while destroying the screen. The process requires anywhere from fifteen to six hundred cigarettes to create a single image. The results of this innovative conceptual appropriation of craft, are fragile, haunting and beautiful images that convey the “live, dream, die,” loop that turns throughout the artist’s larger body of work.