TR Ericsson: Introductions

All My Love Always No Matter What is a seven-volume book collection of letters written by the artist’s mother, Sue, to her only son, Tom (TR Ericsson). It took nearly twenty years and numerous other projects for the artist to finally gather this material into a singular work. In 2004, the year after his mother’s death, fragments of her letters first appeared in a self-published magazine and as part of an installation at a non-profit art center in the Bronx. Her letters have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums as sculptures, paintings and works on paper; her recorded voice narrates a feature length film the artist made in 2015. What emerges in this now complete collection of letters is a vibrant but at times tortured individual who, though struggling with a variety of abuses and addictions, was still capable of great wit and humor and love: a portrait far more revealing than the image of an unknowable face. 

Volume 1 begins with a card written to her father describing a wedding party she hosted for her sister-in-law and the special “Royal Daulton” plates she set out for it. By volume 4 while still only in her fifties, she writes her last letter to her son and daughter-in-law, a brief note that ends humorously but with an ominous overtone, “Treat yourselves, it’s all going to be gone one way or another.” The seven volumes, mostly in her own words, chart a slow descent from her early years as a young wife and new mother to a lonely isolated figure with less and less to live for. But more than charting her degradation, the letters bring us closer to their author, revealing a touching intimacy between mother and son that both expresses the love the work is really about and empowers its title. The artist has painstakingly assembled each book with a loving thoroughness that avoids interpretation or explanation; instead it’s his mother's voice alone that is driving the narrative. In volumes 1 - 5 all the remaining typed or handwritten texts had to be digitally reproduced in rigorous detail to the exact scale of the original correspondence and then organized into a chronological timeline. Volumes 6 and 7 have audio and video components embedded in cut-out pages inside the books along with a complete transcription of each recording. A profuse and disorderly jumble of original audio recordings, including countless answering machine messages, had to be observantly arranged into the same dated chronology as the letters. This slow and methodical process led the artist to many surprising discoveries, including his mother’s final recorded message to him just days before her death.

To read a letter from the past, however near or distant, a letter not written to you personally, becomes an experience of entering into another’s most intimate and private space. The intentions, what is written, can seem obscure and impossible to penetrate to an outsider, the narrative details don’t necessarily resonate, or they do, more often the communication is stripped to it’s essentials, hopelessly dull, humorous, or in this instance emotionally charged.

Letters are/were typically formal. Intimate but often formal. There’s no formality here.

From the first line, “I was half asleep when you called and so did not properly explain Grandpa’s spaz attack.”

From there the letter descends into a scathing attack, a mother writing her distant son about day to day life with a father who both loved and abused her all their lives.

“I’d get those letters at the 92nd Street Y where I lived then, I knew, like this one, they could be wired to explode. I’d read them quickly and then stuff them in a drawer and try to forget about it. Somehow I saved them all. And after she died and even now, I read them all the time, I didn’t know it then, real time, present time can be deceptive. But what she sent to me was nothing more or less than herself, all the shards of her broken up all over, to think of it now it's a rare gift. In my late teens I was lecturing her in the car one day, and she got quiet then said, “Kid, you don’t get me.” She was right. I’m trying now. Better late than never, better to try then not bother at all, better to know I didn’t know, don't know, than assume I did or do.” - TR Ericsson

This work was commissioned by SCAD Museum of Art and exhibited in the show "Frederick Douglass: Embers of Freedom", 2019

TR Ericsson: "The first edition was made in 2012, before I was doing the works in ashes. As I got deeper into the Crackle & Drag work this earlier work took on a deeper significance. So I returned to it in 2017 and made more of these. It was a button/pin of my grandfathers, a gag he had pinned over his desk, I wanted to experiment with bronze and making this small thing was a good start. The process is the original lost wax process where the wax positive is melted out and replaced with the bronze. The process and the language tilted toward the narratives embedded in the Crackle & Drag story and this little object became a more somber and darker token or totem." 

This work was revisited once again, this time in polycarbonate, a material which is significant for the artist as “a plasticized world, alcohol/vodka, an empty bottle, a nothingness, a yearning for what is no longer there. I wanted to create this enlarged sign-like work so it could hang in an exhibition space like the loud voice it was in my head while I made the rest of the work. This simple phrase anchored everything, held it all together, a longing, a lament, a cheap come on.” The  edition is the same size and edition number as Richard Hamilton's “Epiphany" (1964). 

California Sky (1963) attests to a mastery of TR Ericsson's technique of mixing alcohol in with the silkscreen process, thus eating away at the image and creating unexpected alterations. The artist first started working with this process in 2019, obscuring photographs from his family's archive with cocktail ingredients, showing how memories and experiences can be eaten away with substance abuse.

The piece is composed of three enlarged and variously cropped snapshots of the artist’s mother. “The photographs were taken all at once, the photographer, likely my grandfather, moved in closer for each shot.” The pigment is a mix of resin, vodka and a silver metallic silkscreen ink. At certain angles the images are lost in the glare and become abstracted into spilt forms of silver light. “My mother drank. It’s still hard for me to say that. I never thought of her as an alcoholic, but she was. She drank different things, but the vodka was memorable. You can’t make an image with vodka, but you can use it to destroy the image.”

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.