A midwestern gothic.

It’s an enlarged (48 x 60 inches) photograph of a framed photograph from the artists grandfather’s house in Ohio, stained a deep, dark, almost black brown from the smoke that escaped for years into the house from his grandfather’s fireplace. Carbon monoxide poisoning eventually sickened him to the point of being moved to a home where two years later he died of natural causes. At this scale you see the dust and the cracks and the soot.

Making something bigger is like making something louder.

“He had that fire going all year round. Embers would pop and leap out of the fire and burn out on the carpet. The entire living room floor was filled with these different sized black moon like craters. I’d walk in the living room and couldn’t open my eyes the smoke was so bad, let alone breathe and he’d be just sitting there, seemingly unfazed in his easy chair. No one could understand it. We’d go to restaurants and people would say they smelled smoke and it was him.” - TR Ericsson