Chambre d'Amis | Dallas - Edition 1 -TR Ericsson | 5 November - 31 December 2024

Chambre d'Amis I, Dallas Edition x TR Ericsson

"Chambre d'Amis" reimagines the seminal exhibition "Chambres d'Amis" in a recurring series of exhibitions in domestic settings. It combines elements of Jan Hoet's 1986 project in which residents of Ghent, Belgium opened their homes for artistic presentations and interventions, with the older notion of the European salon, which has a long tradition of creating space for cultural gatherings, unusual exhibitions and intellectual exchange. The first edition features works by American artist TR Ericsson nearly a decade after his works appeared in the city during the Dallas Art Fair.

We would all like to thank Tammy, Will and their children for generously welcoming the artist and his family into their home, as well as Katherine Brodbeck, Lucia Simek, the Dallas Museum of Art and Dallas Contemporary for their support.

ABOUT TR Ericsson

Since the untimely death of his mother in 2003, Ericsson has obsessively constructed an expansive and conceptual mixed-media project investigating the lives of the artist, his family and the changing cultural landscape that impacted each generation. At the core of his practice is a desire to understand what one can know about another’s suffering and the value of that understanding. Ericsson begins with an archive of inherited photographs and documents, repurposing these artifacts with traditional as well as experimental art materials to develop a series of intertwining narratives centered around the artist’s mother. These intimate vignettes expand into universal declarations on time, love, loss, memory, and mourning while also providing accounts of issues related to addiction and abuse.

Translating the particulars of his mother’s life into a universal sigil of complex social relationships—blurring the line between artifact and art, memory and the radiating expanse of history as it extends into a sheer involvement with the entropic nature of time. Ericsson’s exhumations bring to light an essential insight as articulated by the poet Li-Young Lee: “If love doesn’t prevail, who wants to live in this world?” This ongoing project has been exhibited and acquired by museums across the USA including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Dallas Museum of Art and many other private and public collections.

This presentation in the home of Tammy and Will Hartnett places one family’s story into another’s and asks if a work of art retains its meaning and beauty without any compromise to the unseen events before and after an image is produced. Each with their own characters and contexts, all families know the complexity of filial bonds and how the traumas of one generation are carried by the next. For all the differences between generations (food, fashion, politics, music, societal challenges and so on), the human journey is consistent: we live, we love, we lose, we dream, we die and the whole thing repeats. It keeps playing long after we can no longer hear it.
BIO

TR Ericsson's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, US), the Dallas Museum of Art (US), the Cleveland Museum of Art (US), the Everson Museum of Art (US), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, US) and many other prestigious public and private collections. His books and zines can be found in numerous library collections including the Yale University Arts Library (New Haven, US) and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (Washington, US). His exhibitions have frequently been featured in prominent publications including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Forum, Art in America, Hyperallergic and others. The artist has earned the following awards: The Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist: Photography Catalog of the Year (2015) and Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards 2016 Best Photography Books Shortlist, the 91st International Print Center Award, Philadelphia, PA (2017) and in 2019 Ericsson was a finalist of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's sixth triennial Outwin Boochever American Portrait Competition with his large scale nicotine work, Bride, a portrait of his mother.
Don't hurt her too bad, Lynn, 2024

Oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in - 121.9 x 121.9 cm

On his way out, the great art critic Peter Schjeldahl left us with this musing – “death is like painting, rather than sculpture, because you can only see it from one side.”

TR Ericsson’s recent paintings throw a wrench in this as they can be read from both sides. On the front of the work Don’t Hurt Her Too Bad Lynn we see Ericsson’s beautiful young mother smiling in front of a shiny new car. By all means, it looks like a joyous rite of passage. The B-side adds context to the subtly muted colors and reminds us of the difference a few minutes might make, and what often hides behind a pretty picture.

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SUE ROBINSON (b.1946)
37506 ARTHUR STREET
WILLOUGHBY, OH
c. 1964

“You should have seen how he smashed my car that I got for graduation, who got it for you but he smashed it such a way that the car man couldn’t believe anyone could do something like that. He cracked the engine block which is almost impossible and then he beat me up. I was outside. I didn't know what was wrong with the car and he did and he came storming into the dining room and he threw me to the floor, knocked me to the floor and proceeded to knock my head into the floor…

“Don’t hurt her too bad, Lynn.”

…grabbing me by the hair and beating me. We were all too scared, you never saw him at his worst. We always lived in fear with him. When he went out of town we were all so happy. It was a terrible life living with him … I walked up to my girlfriend's house and told her what happened and they wanted me to call the police but that’s something else—I could never call the cops on him, the doctors think that the beating I took is probably what gave me the migraines.”

My mother’s father, Lynn Robinson, took the original snapshot. He took all the photographs, unless of course he was in them.

The enlarged text quotation is from a voice recording I made of my mother in 2002, the year before her sudden death at age 57 and a few months after her father died in a nursing home at age 84. I lost the recording, I may have taped over it, but before it was gone I typed it out word for word in its entirety. She had never before expressed to me so clearly or candidly the resentment she felt toward her father than she did during this recording of which this is only a small fragment.

I imagine the work being seen from both sides, like a sculpture. These idealized, or nostalgic and eventually meaningless snapshots hold secret narratives they seldom reveal. If all anyone sees is the woman, my mother, and the car, I would consider the work incomplete and devoid of meaning.

TR ERICSSON (b.1972)
236 6TH AVENUE,
BROOKLYN, NY,
c. 2024
No Smoking, 2024

Nicotine, alcoholic cocktail and metallic gold silkscreen ink on canvas, 13 x 16 in - 33 x 40.6 cm

Similarly, No Smoking and Dining Room begin with blown-up snapshots. Instead of oil paint, these archival images are infused with nicotine and alcohol, haunted memories glittering with gold. The tobacco brown B-side of each painting divulges elements of his archive in a compositional approach operating between literature, philosophy, and intimate confession.

"My mother’s brother, Mike, hated smoking. I don’t know who got him the sign, maybe she did, maybe their father did. The sign was a joke gift and the snapshot of the two of them I made this work from was meant to be funny too. My mother and her brother were close most of their lives. Although he terrorized her when they were children, holding her head under water at the lake, and other cruelties. As adults they were very close, until they were older and their bond began to fray. Ironically, having never smoked a day in his life, my uncle died of lung cancer. He worked in refrigeration and was frequently exposed to asbestos before anyone knew how harmful it was. He died in 2004, the year after my mother died. He was sixty-one, three years older than she was. "

This work was made in Painesville, OH and Brooklyn, NY.

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Dining Room, 2024

Nicotine, alcoholic cocktail and metallic gold silkscreen ink on canvas, 13 x 16 in

"This was my mother’s view from her chair at the dining room table. She probably asked her husband to take the original photograph I used to make this work. It’s where she sat and drank and smoked and sometimes even ate a little. This was the next most darkly nicotine stained room in the house besides her bedroom, which was a shade or two lighter. She always kept things nice, the table was always polished with everything neatly arranged on it. But if you looked closer you saw the cigarette burns in the finish. She loved lighting the candles at night, she loved their spooky glow as she called it. I always think of this photograph as depicting a kind of altar but with no god to pray to. The location of a secular vigil she kept filled with worrying, ruminating and remembering. Late at night the room had a terrible silence and a feeling of haunted loneliness."

This work was made in Painesville, OH and Brooklyn, NY.

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WELL, THE WEEK REALLY STARTED WITH A BANG!” (September 17, 1991), 2023

Silkscreen ink, colored pencil and funerary ashes on dyed muslin, 84 x 52 in

Ericsson has been employing non-traditional materials for the past twenty years and is known for a practice that is as rigorous in craft as it is in conceptual games. In addition to alcohol and nicotine, he also frequently works with his mother's funerary ashes. When asked why he does this, a pragmatic response is first given. Something like, "I am an artist. I make art. What should I do with them? Sprinkle them in the lake?" But something else is at stake, something that may raise goosebumps. Instead of the lake, we now find his mother's remains disseminated in major museums around the world and the homes of other families who now are intertwined with Ericsson's, and care for his mother as she did for many.

Works made from ashes are often images from his archive or amplified letter paintings, which allow his mother to continue to speak. WELL, THE WEEK REALLY STARTED WITH A BANG! (September 17, 1991), not only memorializes a particular day, its series of events, but the handwritten lettering captured in the work branches out into a complex psychological narrative, the nervous rhythm of remembered events, apparent not only in what the words say but how they're shaped, their physiognomy. Ericsson has made nearly a dozen Letter Paintings culminating in a portrait of his mother in the form of a seven volume publication. He also recreated three of these works in bronze for a private sculpture garden associated with the Cleveland Museum of Art.
The clock and the mirror, 2024

Oil on canvas, 78 x 100 in

The clock and the mirror is painted from an absent image, reaching into the depths of memory to recreate a disappeared room. Ericsson’s mother and uncle grew up in this room, as the B-side will tell you; the two children appear in the right window, staring back through layers of time. His mother appears again, as a high school senior, in a framed graduation picture placed carefully on the vanity. The room is empty otherwise, save for a still, riderless toy horse. The light has a strange, diffuse flatness, lacking a discernible time of day. The proportions are slightly odd, and combined with the delicacy of the butterfly wallpaper, the whole space takes on the uncanny feeling of a dollhouse. With his diary entry-style writing, Ericsson provides the most complete possible account of this bygone room; yet, a series of small slippages remains, like the skip of a record, aching with loss.
Thirst #7, 2024

Oil on Canvas, 11 x 14 in - 27.9 x 35.6 cm

The self-portrait Thirst #7 revisits an earlier artwork. At the turn of the century, having little opportunity to exhibit new work and being inspired by the early surrealists, Ericsson began self-publishing a magazine. Thirst Magazine was released bi-annually from 2000 – 2009 in various formats including publications, objects, prints and video. Issue 7 consisted of a DVD with a rare performance piece and a text titled Homelessness: Disconnectedness OR How to Build a Time Machine. The recent painting is of a still image from that video, which in the rearview mirror was a moment of contemplation during which the next decades of practice unfolded. A quarter of a century later, a time machine is part of what his practice constructs as ghosts are mobilized to transfer experience to future generations.
Talk with Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA
In 2017, Katherine Brodbeck acquired the work American Tragedy for the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art. This painting (as well as Theodore Dreiser's novel) were the point of departure for an engaging talk followed by an intimate Q & A session.

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Thank you for joining us.
Photography by Exploredinary.